


Disremembrance

by SMarley



Category: Black Sails, Spooks | MI-5
Genre: M/M, original backstories for canon characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-20 15:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 61,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3655332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMarley/pseuds/SMarley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>NB! AU Black Sails/Spooks crossover story in the form of the retelling of flashbacks in London from Black Sails' season 2 with original backstories for canon characters.</p><p>“You gave me the time to change the memories, you gave me the hope that this was meant to be, but if I forget myself - will you remember me?” ~ Disremembrance by Dannii Minogue</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Forgotten

**Author's Note:**

  * For [annikawrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annikawrites/gifts).



> Presumably, the story includes the events of both Black Sails’ seasons and most of the events taken place in all 10 seasons of Spooks.

_"I feel so calm tonight_  
_Like I'm floating into space_  
_I feel my anger now_  
_Vanishing without a trace_  
_I feel so weak tonight_  
_I'm no longer in control_  
_I feel so different now_  
_That it's time to face my soul_  
  
_You gave me the time_  
_To change the memories_  
_But if I forget myself_  
_Will you remember me?_

 _I feel so faint tonight_  
_Like I'm hardly even there_  
_I feel much older now_  
_But I'm still too young to care_  
  
_You gave me the hope_  
_That this was meant to be_  
_But if I forget myself_  
_Will you remember me?_

 _I feel no fear tonight_  
_I feel no pain_  
_I don't know what I feel_  
_Or hope to gain..."_

 

We burst into the house accompanied by two ARV units. It was a routine roundup for Central Task Force of City of London Police, so I didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary – some would try to escape, some would try to get rid of drugs and illegal firearms, some would cooperate. There was going to be plenty of breaking in, yelling, and running, which would invariably result in taking a bunch of criminals into custody. I also didn’t expect that having dashed into one of the rooms, I would watch some unarmed man knock out two highly trained SCO19 officers, one after another, without breaking a sweat. I froze on the spot in astonishment and came to my senses when he reached out for an MP-5 belonged to one of the unconscious policemen.

“Don’t even think of it!” I barked, aiming my government-issued weapon at him.

As our eyes met, I experienced a massive, leaden feeling of guilt deep inside as if what I was doing was wrong. I was so ashamed of myself that I was the smallest step away from lowering my gun and letting him go against my better judgment.

Luckily for me, at this very moment, a couple of SCO19 officers stormed in through the door at his right, demanding from him to raise his arms and kneel down. Surprisingly, he obeyed. While they snapped handcuffs on his wrists, I couldn’t look him in the face. I looked at anything else, but not at him, and I wasn’t relieved a bit after they led him outside to put in the police van because that felt like betrayal. Like I had to protect him by any means, to fight for him, yet I stood aside.

I kept failing to shake it all off on our way back to the police station. I was in the car trailing that van and the sight of it, the knowledge of him locked up in it with other arrested drug dealers sent shivers down my spine again and again. At some point, shivers transformed into waves of pure panic sweeping over me. The closer we got to our destination, the stronger they became; however, to my great surprise, it stopped as suddenly as it started. The van just needed to part ways with the convoy and disappear behind the gates for me to revert to being myself.

This day promised to be long for me as well as for my colleagues. Arresting one suspect brought miles of paperwork and hours of interrogations in its train on any day, and today we had twenty five suspects. While the uniforms were processing them, I had lunch and returned onto our floor just in time to catch our boss assigning interviews to detectives. I lurked at my table and opened the first folder that lied on it. By law, we had to have our talk with persons of interests in pairs. I hadn’t had a partner since my last partner DI Hal Gates retired, so I hoped that I would be kept out of this bureaucratic circus and to while away time until the end of the working day, I was going to fill in my own endless paperwork, which I constantly forgot to submit as required. Unfortunately, our boss – a young blonde with a runaway model’s figure and protruding frontal teeth – had other plans.

Having dismissed the others, she came up to my desk and dropped a plastic bag with some amount of cash, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a pencil within on it.

“This is all he had with him,” she said. “The uniforms ran his fingerprints though our database and there was no match. He waived the solicitor and he refuses to talk. He’s in Room 5.”

“I can’t interrogate him alone,” I swore to myself. “Mind giving me a hand?”

I counted that she would back off straight away. It was an open secret that Superintendent Eleanor Guthrie got the post of the Head of Central Task Force thanks to her father Richard Guthrie, Commissioner of City of London Police. She did graduate from Hampshire Police Academy on the top of her class, but she never was on patrol or had to sit for all those examinations to be promoted from Police Constable to Superintendent. It was given to her on the silver platter upon her graduation shorty before her twenty-fourth birthday. Everyone knew of it, and this was the reason why she was despised quietly among our ranks.

“Tear your ass off this chair,” she commanded coldly, “and make him bloody talk!”

After that, she just walked out on me. How fucking lovely of her…

Not that I hated to conduct an interrogation, I, in fact, was brilliant at it, I just promised my wife that I would be at home by 7pm today because, as an exception, she took half a day off to cook a dinner for the two of us. The problem was that one never knew how long a conversation with a suspect would last. It could be short, it could be long. It could be simple, it could be difficult. Normally, I would be game for it. If it weren’t for Miranda. Our marriage had been in the doldrums for quite a while, and I really wanted us to do our best to patch things up. The tenth wedding anniversary was a great occasion.

At all events, the sooner I would go into that room, the sooner I would go out. Having grabbed my notebook along the plastic bag left by Superintendent Guthrie, I headed for Room 5.

When I opened the door and saw him – that man – sitting at the table with his cuffed hands on its top, his turning his head in my direction got me abashed in a matter of seconds. He was rather young. In his early thirties or so. He had a good-looking face of a pleasant, law-abiding person with deep-set eyes of intense blue colour, two-day bristle and short dishevelled straw hair. His clothes was cheap and dirty, a tramp would wear something of this sort, but somehow he produced an impression of an upper class, well-educated and good-mannered individual. What amazed me most of all was his groomed hands with manicured nails. A homeless person couldn’t have such hands.

Followed by his look that made me feel uneasy, I slammed the door and proceed to the chair standing on opposite side of the table from him. It wasn’t a gaze or a glare. He was just scrutinizing me - calmly and friendly - as if I wasn’t a copper, he wasn’t under arrest, and we were going to have a nice chat about English weather. I sat down and turned the recorder on.

“It’s March, 20th,” I cast a glance at my watch, “1:18 pm. Interrogation Room 5. Detective Inspector James McGraw is interviewing the suspect without a partner by order of Superintendent Eleanor Guthrie. The solicitor was waived by the interviewee.” I directed my eyes to him. “Please, name yourself for the record.”

He didn’t say a word. Whatever I did, he kept silence. I tried pretending his friend, I tried pressurizing him, I tried cutting him to the quick, I tried manipulating him, I tried fooling him. Nothing worked. He just watched me try to break him with this subtle smile on his lips. It seemed to be entertaining so much for him that I was ready to yell at him because he'd unnerved me as hell by the moment my boss dropped in and left the door open. She held keys and a folder in her hands.

“Mr Hamilton,” she addressed to him, “you’re free to go.” She took the handcuffs off his wrists and pointed at a young woman in uniform in the corridor, “Constable Parker will show you out.”

With a smile, a real one this time, he got up and went out. I turned the recorder off and stared at Eleanor.

“What the fuck you just did?”

She threw the folder onto the table, “He’s clean. Just a bystander. An ordinary man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Read yourself.”

“He pinned down two SCO19 officers with no trouble at all right in front of my eyes. Whoever he is, he’s not—“ I moved the folder closer to myself and looked in. “Thomas Hamilton.”

In reply, she came to the recorder and by pressing a couple of buttons, erased the entire conversation between him and me that wasn’t a conversation in reality. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And that was all there was to it. Sometimes I hated her. Of all bosses, I’d ever had she was the worst one. For the simple reason that she had no idea what she was doing. Nevertheless, I didn’t bother arguing with her so long as all I was able to think of was that man who had sat opposite me a few minutes ago. I was strangely happy that he had been released as if it was right of us to set him free. As if it was fair. As if it was something I could live with, this primitive fact that he was at large now and, most likely, I would never see him again. I was at peace with it.

Later on, I didn’t manage to recall this feeling. It was gone as completely as I was carried away by dealing with the paperwork and, subsequently, my life. I got home earlier than expected, and the first thing I noticed driving up the street was my father’s car parked on the spot where I usually parked my car. He really knew how to get under my skin, my beloved father, without even appearing in my presence. Miranda’s car was on its place, so I had to leave mine by the pavement.

My wife, who was an aristocratically looking, athletically built, middle-aged woman with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, rushed out of our house and met me half way on the lawn.

“James,” she chattered, “I didn’t know he was in London, I swear to you.”

“Oh really?” I couldn’t refrain from sarcasm.

She stopped in front of me and put her hand on my chest, “James, please, don’t spoil the day.”

I was torn between the urge to yell at her because the day had been already spoiled for me by his visit although I hadn’t greeted him yet as the master of the house and the desire to turn round and go off. I was sure as hell that she knew all along. She might even invite him. They got on, after all. It was me who had always stayed away from him in one way or another because having him around was unbearable for me. It had been suffocating me since childhood during which I frequently ran away from my parents’ country house and he sent the police after me so that they would bring me back. I never told her why, though, not that I knew it myself, so she must have considered it to be my whim and undertaken this sacred mission to reconcile us. As if it was possible in principle.

“Okay.” I was unable to say “no” to her even if and when I truly wanted to.

My wife smiled and, having put her arm on my elbow, led me inside of our home. Alfred McGraw, the old wrinkled man with lush grey hair, was sitting in the living room and reading one of the magazines Miranda wrote for.

“Hi, Dad,” I forced myself to utter this. “Scotch?”

I did need to drink something strong enough to live through this evening. He nodded royally in agreement, and under this pretext, I gladly retreated to the kitchen. Sadly, I had no pretext to retreat from my house.

It’d always been weird for me to play host to him, but tonight it was far more weirder than usual. I kept having this feeling that there should have been somebody else here, with us, at the table. The more I drank, the stronger it became, this sensation of the elephant in the room.

I didn’t stay in touch with Alfred because communicating with him was hard for me. We fell out on a regular basis over nothing for the most part. The man of the old school, he didn’t like that Miranda worked and earned more than I did, nor did he like that she was more successful in her career and quite famous in her area. He would love her to be a housewife and a mother. He didn’t like that I was a police officer and never got tired of repeating, “It’s not a job for a decent man, Jimmy,” or demanding from me to steady down and start a family. He wanted me to be a father whereas I wasn’t sure that I was a good husband, to begin with. Worst of all, he was in the habit of voicing his thoughts in a very unceremonious manner. Usually, I held my tongue and turn a deaf ear to play the role of an obedient son. Tonight, I suddenly decided that I’d had enough of it and I just worded every single thing I thought of him and his views on our life strongly. As a result, he took a French leave.

“Oh my God, James!” Miranda exclaimed as the door clapped to, “What’s got into you?! He’s your father! He wants what’s best for you!”

“This is what you call ‘best for me’?!” I snarled. “To go to into retirement ahead of time, to move to the bloody countryside, to have a crowd of children?! I don’t want to retire from the police! I don’t want to move out of London, let alone to his precious Scotland! I don’t want to be a father!”

“Maybe, I want to be a mother!” she screamed out at the top of her lungs with akin pain in her voice. “Have you ever admitted even the thought that, maybe, I’ve waited all these years for you to say ‘Let’s have a baby’?”

“Then you married the wrong McGraw!” I cut short, giving her to understand in that way that the discussion was over, she liked it or not.

The funny thing was that she dated my younger brother Darby prior to hooking up with me at their engagement party. He was really into her and popped the question after the week of going out. I told him that she was a bad choice right after he brought her to London to introduce us to each other, she really was. A younger girl, less ambitious and beautiful, would be ideal for him. He wasn’t good for her, either. Too young, too naïve, too rural. He wouldn’t listen to me, though, so I did what I must to prevent him from making the worst mistake of his life – I seduced her, and she didn’t even resist long or actively. Predictably, Darby conceived a hatred for me. Predictably, I couldn’t care less. I was infatuated with her – this strong, stunning, sophisticated, successful woman. We got married two months later and had been together ever since. However, it never crossed my mind that we could have had something more complex than we already had. A family, among other things. In my opinion, we could be lovers under the masks of spouses and share the roof under our heads, but something more than that? I kept failing to envision it. What was worse, I even didn’t want to try envisioning it properly.

That night, I slept on the couch in the living room - I’d be highly surprised if she let me in our bedroom after what I’d said to her – and I didn’t mind, actually. I needed to be alone for a while.

I dreamt of her. I’d been dreaming of her since I met her. I’d often had dreams in which she was wandering about some enormous mansion – always the same old mansion - in luxurious corseted dresses. She’d never spoken to me in those dreams, not a single word, so when she did, I was taken off guard because of both - it was the first time when I heard her voice in my sleep, and she was different. Everything around us was different: the house, her clothes, her face expression, her accent.

_She had a white, worn-out negligée on. Her dark hair wasn’t done, they were left loose. She seemed to be tired and upset. The room we were in looked big and musty._

_“If you’re upset with me, I’d appreciate you saying so.” She spoke English like a highborn lady, with all those specific intonations and elegant modulation of pitch she didn’t have in her real-life way of speaking._

_I was pulling on my boots when she demanded the answer. I raised my head to glance at her. “You know why I’m upset.”_

_“Because I read to him?” She was either outraged or disappointed, or both at once. I couldn’t quite make it out._

_I exploded with unexpected anger, “There’s a whole shelf full of books! Why’d you have to read him that one?”_

_“Perhaps, because I am no longer willing to bury it on a shelf and pretend it has no meaning for me.” She was on the verge of bursting into tears. “That book is something I shared with Thomas. I just missed it. Our life then when he was alive. I can feel myself forgetting it, and I don’t want to forget it. This place, this life that we’ve been living here, it doesn’t feel like living anymore. I can’t be alone in feeling this way. Some part of you must feel it, too.”_

_I jumped at my feet in a flash, not knowing what I was about to do. Some part of me, that part she was referring to, hardly could keep itself from flying at her and breaking her neck with bare hands. It was in agony of never-ending pain. It was ashamed. It was furious. It was driven and unstoppable. It was dangerous. I had to control it for our mutual sake, and I did at the price of everything else. Until she let it loose by mentioning that name I didn’t want to hear ever again and, at the same time, was dying to pronounce myself because it, for some obscure reason, meant something to me. But what? What possibly could it mean to me? This name. I searched my memory for the answer and when I realized that it wasn’t there anymore, I was stricken with chilling terror._

I woke up in a cold sweat and, still lying on the couch, fixed my eyes on the ceiling to catch my breath. I was paralyzed by this horrifying feeling, sending awfully familiar shivers down my spine, which I took along, escaping from that dream, that I’d forgotten something. Something essentially important.


	2. Taken

I was late. Ordinarily, I would set the alarm clock before falling asleep, but it resided on the nightstand in the bedroom, and Miranda didn’t bother shaking me out of my drunken slumber in the morning. So, it was past lunchtime when I finally showed up at work.

Eleanor was at her office. She could be seen through the glass wall separated her working space from ours sitting on the edge of her massive table with folded arms and talking to somebody who was guarded from prying eyes by the plastic door. To my misfortune, she noticed my arrival and leaped up.

“James!” She shouted out as she opened the door wide and peered out. “My office! Now!”

The guy she was chatting with stood up when I overstepped the threshold. He was a giant, around two-metre tall, and very young, around twenty four years old or so, with the face of a simple person and broad shoulders.

“DI James McGraw… Constable William Bones.” Eleanor introduced us to each other first and, having turned towards me, specified in a steady, emotionless voice, “Your new partner.” Then, she didn’t give the new addition to our ranks any chance to be polite towards me by pointing out to the detectives’ room, “That empty desk opposite his is yours now.”

He picked up the box with his belonging from the floor and went there.

I slammed the door behind him. “You’re kidding?! I’m not going to babysit this straight-from-the-academy asshole. We have the uniforms for training them.”

“Not my decision.” She rounded her famous table and sat down.

“And you couldn’t have declined it?!” I was annoyed as hell and my prolonged hangover didn’t make me any calmer or kinder. “What the fuck he’s doing here, to begin with? Nobody makes it to Central Task Force right after the graduation ceremony unless he’s a Guthrie.”

By her face expression, I understood that I’d hit the nail on the head.

“Fuck me,” I allowed myself to comment on it.

“Look,” she sighed, “I don’t want to be responsible for him, either, but there is nothing I can do about it. So, why wouldn’t you stop complaining like a girl and go do your fucking job, James?” She nodded royally at the exit, “And close the door, please.”

In answer, I stormed out of her office and left the door open. If she needed it to be closed, she could very well do it herself.

Bones was adjusting Gates’ chair to his height. Having reached my desk, I grabbed a good half of a pile of folders towering on it and dropped on Gates’ desk. The rookie stared at me questioningly. Truly, a man of few words. It almost forced me to like him because others – were they in his shoes at the moment – would have already driven me nuts by this time through trying to have a small talk with me, and I wasn’t a chatty person. Especially today. I returned to my chair and wrote down a few key things to look at while skimming over the folders’ content on the first blank page of my notebook, which I tore out afterwards and threw onto his desk.

“I need you to select all the case that match this description from that pile.”

He raised his eyebrows, “Don’t we have computers for that?”

“We do,” I took the folder crowned my pile and put it on my table, “Our archives don’t.”

Elaborating on this eternal pain in the ass of any police officer no further, I lowered my head and got absorbed in reading.

My phone rang an hour later. I darted a glance at its screen. It was my wife calling. I chose to ignore her. After all, it wouldn’t have taken that much for her to wake me up today. Although the hint was obvious, she, evidently, chose to ignore it because this damn phone kept ringing. Over and over again. Yes, she was that pushy.

Irritated, I turned off the sound and pulled out the upper drawer of my desk to flick the phone into it. It fell down on the plastic bag with Thomas Hamilton’s belongings, which he didn’t collect before leaving the interrogation room yesterday. Obeying some odd impulse, I fished it out and pushed the drawer in. There was nothing unusual, attracting attention inside – a pack of Parliament cigarettes that could be bought in every corner store, a cheap lighter that could be bought there, too, a pencil that could be found at every British office and I myself had several of them, and a dozen of banknotes. I doubted that they were fake. The uniforms would tell us if they were. Still, something seemed to be off about them, so I laid them out on the top of my table to meditate on their look. It always helped me think.

Constable Bones got distracted from reading his part of the folders by my movements. He lifted his head and ran his eyes over the banknotes.

“The numbers,” he said. “They follow each other in strict succession.” I looked closely and yes, he was right. Visibly confused by my surprise, he shrugged, “My mum works in accounting.”

And what the odds were that somebody in this city would carry around banknotes with matching numbers? As I placed my notebook in front of me to make a list of these numbers to have one of my friends in the police force to check them, the landline phone hiding near my computer’s monitor rang.

I pressed the telephone receiver to my ear with my shoulder, “DI McGraw.”

“James?” Of course, it was Miranda. I should have guessed that if I kept ignoring my mobile phone, she would try to reach me on my work phone.

“I’m busy.”

“I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t forget about the reception at the Brazilian embassy we’re invited to,” she sounded as if nothing happened last night and she wasn’t pissed off at all even if I knew that she sure as hell was. “It’s tonight. At 7 o’clock.”

In fact, I did forget. For the banal reason that I’d never liked all those high-society gatherings she adored to attend and never looked forward to be a part of them. It was such a waste of time in my opinion. However, I was sort of obliged to accompany her because the etiquette and the unspoken rules of her occupation required, which basically means that in a few hours, I would need to put on that goddamned suit, tighten up that stranglehold called ‘tie’ on my neck and do something about my face and manners.

“I’ll be at home by six.” I hung up, not waiting for her to say her usual ‘I love you, be careful’.

And I did come home at the appointed hour. The working day was quiet, overall. Bones and I got through all those folders by its end, and I managed to make a brief visit to the Economic Crime Directorate where one of my police academy classmates worked. If anyone could tell me a thing or two about money, it was Idelle. I left the list with her and was lucky enough not to stick in traffic. It didn’t matter, though, because by our silent mutual agreement, we still weren’t back on speaking terms. We met in our house in silence, we changed in silence, we made our way to the reception by my car in silence. Having arrived at the Brazilian embassy, we had to get through security first, but immediately after it was done and we were permitted to go inside, my wife abandoned me in the middle of the crowd of guests to find somebody she definitely wanted to see more than me today.

 “Suzie!” Miranda came running to a gorgeous dark-complexioned middle-aged brunette in a blue evening dress who swung at the sound of her voice. “Eu reconheceria essa postura em qualquer lugar!” The women laughed and embraced each other tight. “Há quanto tempo...?”* (look at End Notes for translation)

Watching them interact with each other, I guessed, thanks to the language they spoke in, that this was that friend of hers I’d never seen in person although I knew that she and my wife had been pretty attached at hip while they both attended University of São Paulo. Miranda went to Brazil for two semesters to study Portuguese and journalism, her friend studied there at Master’s level, they met at some student party and had been close friends ever since. To this day, they texted back and forth, exchanged emails almost daily, had long conversations via Skype, and sometimes it seemed to be quite unclear to me whether it had been just a friendship or they had taken it a bit further at some moment. I never asked for clarification, though.

“Tempo demais!” Her friend stopped a waiter serving the guests round with drinks and took two glasses of champagne from his tray. “Quando foi que a vida ficou tão complicada a ponto de nos impedir de encontrar amigos queridos?”

Miranda raised her glass, “Acho que foi quando o espumante virou nosso melhor amigo.”

“Um brinde às velhas amizades que não perecem à distância.” The other woman gave a toast and they both sipped at their glasses, smiling.

My wife was carried away and oblivious of my presence right until I approached them.

“This is my husband James McGraw,” Miranda twisted her arm around my elbow with a charming smile and shifted her loving gaze to me. She pointed at the woman standing before us with an elegant gesture of her hand still holding the glass, “James, this is my dearest friend Suzana Cardoso.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you.” She smiled at me, holding out her hand to me. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Miranda.”

“Likewise.” I shook her hand, wondering what exactly my wife told her about me.

This very revelation that they discussed me and, respectively, our marriage made me feel extremely uncomfortable. Not that I was a private person, who hid his personal life from people around himself, I just thought that what was going on behind the closed door should remain behind those doors. My wife, apparently, had a different opinion. It was way too late after ten years of being together to get mad at her for confiding to her best friend, but I was mad because I’d never done anything like this and I expected that she had been doing the same at least out of respect for me.

Suzana broke in a charming smile when a tall black man in his early fifties, judging by his appearance, joined us. He addressed to my wife in Portuguese and leaned over to kiss her cheek.

“This is my husband Bernardo Fontes,” Suzana explained to me.

I wasn’t surprised to have discovered that Miranda knew the Brazilian ambassador to the United Kingdom. She was acquainted with many the-powers-that-be I would have never met if I hadn’t been married to her. The ambassador and I shook hands and along with our wives, got engaged in high-society chatter, which I hated to the bottom of my heart, and Miranda obviously enjoyed.

Mercifully, I was saved shortly from slow death of boredom by a solid-build, balding man with features of a commoner in a grey suit who was two heads below the ambassador.

“Bernie!” He stretched his arms with a cunning smile. “Look at you…” They clenched each other for a couple of seconds, then the stranger, who spoke like a properly-educated upper class Englishman, but not like a Londoner, turned to Suzana, “Could I borrow him for a minute?”

She nodded, “Sure.”

“Suzie!” My wife reproached her friend as soon as these two men left our small company. “You never told me that they know each other!”

“You’re a journalist, Miranda,” Suzana reminded with underlying irony in her tone. “I can’t tell you everything, and besides, I didn’t know myself that they’ve, apparently, got a history.”

“Why this is such a big deal?” I wasn’t intrigued, I was bored and looking for something to entertain myself. Gossips were just as good to this effect as anything else. “Who is that?”

“Harry Pearce,” Miranda said. “The head of the Counter-Terrorism department of MI5.”

“Seriously?” I turned my head in that direction where the men went to take a good look at the person who had even more power in this country than our Prime Minister or the Queen herself.

However, when I caught of a glimpse of the man I tried to interrogate yesterday, I forgot about Harry Pearce immediately. Clean-shaven, in an expensive black suit with a white shirt and a tie, he barely resembled that pretending-to-be-homeless goof whom he portrayed at the police station. He acted differently, too. He was more focused and less carefree. He came to a homely-looking woman with blond hair wearing shoulderless, sleeveless floor-length dress of black colour and handed over one of two glasses he’d brought along to her. Instead of stopping in front of her, he stopped by her side, and they even didn’t look at each other as lovers or friends would do, they looked around, observing what was going on behind each other’s back. Having bended over her shoulder, he whispered something to her ear and moved forward. She didn’t stay where she was, either. They started walking about the room in which the reception was held, and their paths never crossed. Wherever they were, one of them kept one half of the space under observation whereas another watched over the other half.

Yet nobody saw it coming. In one second, it was yet another boring official gathering, and in the next second, something went off upstairs. Following that, all hell broke loose: a few armed men in ski masks dashed in to open fire, and people started screaming in horror, flinging about, having panic attacks, being wounded and killed. It always happened when civilians got caught in the crossfire between the police and criminals, and I hated it. Why the fuck they never could keep cool and calm in such situations? Most of those who were killed in the first few minutes of this nightmare could have avoided ending up dead if they hadn’t lost their grip in the beginning of it.

Thankfully, Miranda had iron nerves, so she just gasped Suzana’s arm and dragged her along when I pushed her away from a falling chandelier. In so doing, I had time to see the man I knew as Thomas Hamilton running up the stairs that led to the next floor, and my first impulse was to rush after him. Instead, I threw my wife and her friend down and shielded them with my body from the bullets flying back and forth. This cacophony lasted for fifteen minutes at minimum and was put to an end by the police that had come not as fast as they could have, considering that the Brazilian embassy was located in the centre of London and this reception was treated as a high-profile official event.

The aftermath of the attack was impressive. As I jumped at my feet, I found myself standing in the room, which floor was covered with the dead and the bleeding men and women. There were holes in the walls and a good half of the ceiling had disappeared. The ambassador lied motionless a few steps away from me with Harry Pearce sitting by his side and pressing his crumped jacket to his chest.

“Bernardo!” Suzana moaned at my right.

She couldn’t get up on her own because her leg was injured. When I jerked her up, it turned out that she couldn’t walk, either, so Miranda and I had to bring her to her husband.

“Come on, Bernie,” Harry repeated, gazing in his eyes, “Come on, we’ve been through much worse than this, and you’ve never given up on me. You can do this for yourself. Don’t bloody dare die!”

“Harry!” A young fair-haired man breezed in the room with paramedics on his heels.

“I’m fine!” Harry brushed away a doctor who tried to take a better look at the wound on his head and cleared the space around the ambassador by rising from his knees. “Dimitri, where are Adam and Ros?”

“I lost contact with them right after the explosion,” that man replied.

“Harry!” The woman I’d seen Thomas Hamilton exchanging words with was picking her way to us through paramedics. Barefooted, she was limping, her nose was bleeding, the hem of the skirt was torn off, and by her face, it was plain as day for anyone that she was about to inform him of something really bad. “Harry, they didn’t come for whatever the Brazilians keep upstairs. They knew that we would be here. That’s why they came. They needed one of us, and they took him. They took Adam.”

_“Took him?” This question escaped me before I even realised that I was about to ask it. “Took him where?”_

_Suddenly, I heard Miranda’s voice coming from nowhere, “Bethlem Royal Hospital. He is to be committed there, owing to his uncontrollable grief over having learned of my affair with you.” And my own voice telling her, “We’re going to get him out of there.” I saw her in one of those beautiful corseted dresses from my dreams with a fur cape on her shoulders, her tearful eyes, and I sensed her presence as if she was right here, before me. Her lips uttered quietly, “We can’t.”_

To my greatest surprise, nobody even looked at me, and why would they? If I never asked this question? if I never had this conversation with my wife? if I had no idea what it was about? However, I felt it all – this rage, this pain, this shock, this confusion, this helplessness, this vulnerability – at once, and it controlled me. I had to apply supreme effort to begin to think straight again. Unfortunately, by the moment I collected myself enough to swim out of this delusion back to the real world, Harry Pearce and his team were already gone. And they were my one and only lead.

Miranda seized my arm when I stepped to go find them, “James…”

Without even glancing at her, I broke out and went where I wanted to go because I wasn’t going to make the same mistake ever again and, subsequently, keep being ashamed of listening to her instead of following my instincts. All the more so I finally could do something to save him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Translation of the dialogue in Portuguese (by the courtesy of my friend delahov):  
> "Suzie! I would recognize that posture anywhere... For how long...?"  
> "Too long! When did life become so complicated we couldn't even meet our friends in person?"  
> "I think it was when champagne became our best friend."  
> "A toast to old friendships that don't perish in the face of distance."


	3. Asylum

Chaos was everywhere, so nobody prevented me from doing what I usually did when I got summoned to a crime scene although I didn’t have authority to investigate the attack on a foreign embassy. Since I, predictably, hadn’t succeeded in finding Harry Pearce and his team, I focused on retracing the movements of the man I knew as Thomas Hamilton and they called Adam, starting with the moment when he ran upstairs after the explosion. Judging by what I saw in the corridors connecting the room where the bomb was blown off to the steps and other rooms, he'd given his abductors one hell of a fight before they dragged him, most likely, unconscious by that time, to the garage. It appeared that they'd hijacked one of the cars registered to the Brazilian embassy to slip away unnoticed and unstopped. That was badass smart of them because, seriously, who of the police officers patrolling the streets of London would stop a car with diplomatic plates on suspicion that its passengers weren’t high-ranked foreign officials, their bodyguards, and personal assistants? Whom in his right mind it would even occur to?

On the other hand, such cars had GPS trackers. Under normal circumstances, I would have never managed to acquire the right number, but tonight I just needed to search out the head of the embassy security and flash my badge. Following that, I drove to my police station and had the car traced by our specialists. As I surmised, the intruders ditched it once they had crossed the Thames and reached East Dulwich from where they could go literally anywhere. Provided that they also changed cars covertly in some dark back street, which, according to traffic cameras footage, they did at some point. By morning, it became clear that nothing more or less useful was discovered on the bodies of the deceased attackers as well. Thus, the police found themselves to be at a deadlock. Theoretically, I was at it, too, but, as opposed to them, I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that I’d already run out of options all the more so there still was one option left. To set the wheels in motion, I didn’t even have to find a way to get to the bloody northern suburbs where Commissioner Richard Guthrie lived because at this ungodly hour, owing to what happened in St James's, he was already at Wood Street police station.

However, to make my way to that building was a whole lot easier than to force it through the pack of the big bosses filled the floor on which his office was situated. When I entered his reception room, I was as strung-up and pissed off as I’d never been in my entire life, and I wasn’t a well-balanced person in principle.

“DI McGraw to see Commissioner Guthrie,” I threw to his secretary, passing by her desk at full speed in order not to let her stop me. “He’s not expecting me.”

I thrust the door of his office open and saw that Richard was on the phone. I used it as my advantage to shut the door and latch it without any obstruction or objection. After that, I proceeded to his table to pull the receiver out of his hand and slam it down.

“Do you have any idea whom I was talking to?” He asked arrogantly with poorly concealed angry notes in his tone.

“I need you to call Harry Pearce and tell him that I will be his police liaison in investigating the attack on the Brazilian embassy,” I uttered distinctly, still trying to control my temper.

“There is no way I will do this.”

Not thinking twice, I grabbed one of his hands before rounding his desk and made his face kiss its top by twisting his arm. Having leaned on his back with my elbow, I bended over to his ear.

“I don’t really have time to go to the press and tell them about your scandalous sex adventures and illegitimate children holding the positions within the police force they aren’t qualified for although they would love to feature it all on their front pages, so let me put it this way…” I took a letter opener lying among his correspondence and plunged it into his hand, which I first pressed to his desk. To his credit, he didn’t scream nor did he cry for help, even knowing that he would have been heard if he tried. “You ether will give this goddamn call to Harry Pearce or you won’t get out of this room alive.”

“Let go of me,” he croaked, “and I will call him.”

Keeping squeezing the wrist of his wounded hand, I straighten up so that he could sit upright and touch the phone. He put it on speaker and dialled some number. The Head of the Counter-Terrorism department of MI5 answered the call almost immediately.

“Richard,” he said caustically. “Finally got around to apologizing for having screwed up tonight? Positively, fifteen minutes are such impressive response time that I’m sure Home Secretary will happy to hear every detail of this outstanding police achievement.”

“I’m afraid that you’ve screwed up even more impressively if a foreign embassy in UK soil was attacked by the devil knows whom while you and your guys were inside,” Richard parried coldly. “Still, I’m not really interested in shifting the blame on you, to be honest. So, let’s put this grudge away for a less rainy day and find the way to cover this bullshit up for our mutual sake. Shall we?”

There was a long pause before Harry responded. “What do you suggest?”

“I’ll send my guy to you,” Guthrie cast a sidelong look at me. “He’s not from my chain of command so he won’t be getting in the way, politically speaking. He will be reporting to me solely, but you can have him sighed whatever you see fit if you wish, for all I care, and when we have all the facts at our disposal, we will cook up some believable story together to feed to Home Secretary.”

“His name?”

“DI James McGraw.”

“Send him over.”

As Pearce hang up, Richard turned his head towards me, “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

I tore the letter opener out of his hand and tucked it into the inner pocket of my jacket, “It’s always nice to do business with you, Richie.”

Having left his office, I made time to change. Out of habit, I always kept a spare set of clothes in the boot of my car so long as in my line of work, you never knew what you could smack into or what you would need to lend. The possibility to take off my dirty and jammed suit along with the fucking tie and these ‘highly-inconvenient-for-police-work’ patent-leather shoes and put on my usual jeans, shirt, leather jacket, and pseudo-army boots came in handy and did my mood a bit of good. I stopped feeling cornered as if I’d never had any other choice but to live the life I’d rather been forced into choosing than had chosen of my own free will. As if nothing mattered anymore – my career, my marriage, my reputation, my freedom, my life or death. I couldn’t care less about where Miranda was at the moment and whether she was okay or not. I didn’t give the slightest fuck about what Richard Guthrie would do to get even with me for the hole in his hand. I didn’t think of the consequences that would follow my outright abuse of my official status as a police officer. There was only one thing that kept me going and unconditionally justified everything I did for me. I had to find him at any cost. As soon as possible.

I got rid of the letter opener by hurling it into the River Thames on my way to Thames House serving as the headquarters of MI5. For the simple reason that being tried for assault and infliction of a bodily harm was absolutely out of question for me, I had far worse sins on my conscience to be convicted for such a mere nothing. An unremarkable at first sight woman, who introduced herself as Ruth Evershed, met me in the lobby and led me through the security before bringing me to the Counter-Terrorism department commonly known as Section D, which was surprisingly empty and quiet.

“Harry,” she peered in one of the rooms, “DI McGraw is here.”

“Show him in,” I heard him replying, “and ask Jo to drop by when she’s back, please.”

With a nod, Ruth opened the door wide so that I could step into a big conference room with an enormous scene hanging on one of the walls. I did, and it turned out that Harry Pearce had retentive memory and tended to paid attention to what was going on around him because I was recognised instantly. Yet he didn’t comment on it in any way, just offered me to take a seat by gesturing towards the row of the chairs standing across the long office table from him. As I sat, he moved a multipage document to me with a pen placed on it. I took both and signed the nondisclosure agreement.

“You didn’t read it,” he remarked in a steady voice after I shove it back to him.

“Should I?” I shrugged. “Considering that it basically says that I’ll be tried for high treason or, most likely, killed off by one of government fixers of sorts if I ever decide to give state secrets away?”

“Sharp and rude,” Harry snorted. “What did you do at the Brazilian embassy last night?”

“Accompanied my wife, Miranda Barlow.”

“The journalist.”

“We don’t discuss our jobs at home.”

There was knock at the door preceding the appearance of a young pretty woman with long light brown hair and dark blue eyes in the room. Pearce and I rose from the table synchronously.

“Jo Portman,” Harry let me know of her name in a very dry, but still polite manner. “DI James McGraw, our police liaison during the investigation of the attack on the Brazilian embassy.”

“Hello,” she shook my hand, smiling at me amicably, and turned her eyes to her boss. “That McGraw?” Harry looked perplexed. “Adam didn’t tell you? I thought that you guys are thick as thieves. He interrogated Adam a couple of days go after he got busted during the police roundup.”

“Apparently, you two are thicker than we are,” he took the document I’d signed and walked round the table heading to the exit. “I’ll be in my office.”

She nodded, and he went out while I was trying to imagine something like this happening at the police station where I worked. We the detectives kept together, but there was an abyss between us and our bosses. Here, they all, for some reason, seemed to be on close terms with each other.

“Okay, let’s begin,” Jo plugged the flash drive to the screen on the wall and a lot of photographs and classified reports showed on it. “They call themselves ‘The Walrus crew’ and specialize in high-profile heists. Sometimes, they do rob banks, auction houses, and jewellery companies; however, mostly, they hunt for sensitive information of political or financial kind, which they sell afterwards to anyone who offers the highest price. They can be hired to steal something specific as well, and before they kidnapped Adam, we believed that they were after one of the Brazilian state secrets. In the light of the fact that nothing disappeared from the embassy, it’s obvious that a high-ranking MI5 officer was their primary target. Most likely, they were after Harry, and Adam just got in the way. Since he’s Chief of London Section D, he’s just as good for being a source of whatever they want to obtain from MI5 as Harry himself would be.” She pointed at two black and white portraits of a white man with long curly black hair and a woman of African descent. “These are their leaders – John Silver nicknamed ‘Long’ and his wife Max. They’re in Paris right now, and the French Intelligence has them under round-the-clock surveillance. Sadly, they can easily go off the grid when they feel like it. They’ve played the agencies of many countries before, so we can lose them at any time. They have allies in the UK.” She pointed at another picture. This time it was a woman with red hair and stern look. “This is Anne Bonny, she’s Northern Irish living in Bromley and heavily connected to the IRA. Ros and Dimitri are trying to get hold of her as we speak. If anyone knows Adam’s current whereabouts, it has to be her.”

“We tracked the car they’d used to flee from the embassy,” I noted, processing what I’d heard just only in passing. “They’d left it in East Dulwich.”

“We followed the signal of Adam’s phone and earphone and found them thrown away in Forest Hill,” she nodded shortly. “So, yes, they must have been going to some place on the coast from Dover to Eastbourne to sail to France where they’re supposed to meet with Silver and Max.”

“Can I take a look at the map?” As soon as the map of central and eastern England appeared on the screen, I came up to it and started thinking aloud, poking my finger into the places I mentioned on the map, “This is the embassy. They cross the river and ditch the car in East Dulwich. They get rid of the phone in Forest Hill. Where does their British contact live? In Bromley.”

It was when I saw it – Bethlem Royal Hospital located too close to Bromley for that to be pure coincidence – and heard Miranda’s voice saying, _“Bethlem Royal Hospital. He is to be committed there, owing to his uncontrollable grief over having learned of my affair with you.”_ And everything in me began screaming, all at once – my intuition, my professional flair, my years of experience, my instincts. Weren’t I a police officer and a detective, I would have ignored this, but I was and I had the first-hand knowledge of how often what we couldn’t explain rationally or prove scientifically turned out to be true.

I looked at Jo and rapped at the image of that hospital on the map, “Can we get in there?”

“I think so,” Jo was surprised. “Why?”

“Shot in the dark.”

“Okay,” she said without giving this any second thought. “I’m driving.”

Jo dropped in at Harry’s office to inform him of where we were heading and ten minutes later, we hit the road. It took around one hour for us to reach our destination.

Bethlem Royal Hospital, as I found out, reading its profile in MI5 database on Jo’s tablet, was the first and oldest European institution for the treatment of the mentally ill, notoriously known as Bedlam, the worst example of an asylum, in the past centuries. It didn’t look deterrent in real life. It was yet another British hospital – faithlessly clean and pedantically organised, with amiable and honest staff as far as I could judge. It was hard to realise that all the horrors of insanity hid behind these walls.

After I introduced myself as a police officer, we were led to the hospital director – a beanpole wearing glasses to whom I took an instant dislike. Maybe, it was just this place dispiriting me, but I barely could resist the uncontrollable urge to strangle him because his sluggishness got on my nerves.

“I’m sorry,” he shook his head when I explained the purpose of our visit to him. “Medical records are confidential.”

“Oh damn it!” I had no idea how I managed to keep my grip this far. “I don’t need your medical records. I need a list of all people who were submitted to this hospital during the last two years.”

“Whom are you looking for?”

Jo answered first, “A white male of British origin, fair hair, blue eyes, in his early thirties.” When he checked this description against their database on his computer and shook his head again, giving us to understand that there were no matches, she added, “During the last five or ten years?”

He checked again. “Twenty five of our patients measure up.”

She perked up, “Do you have their photographs?”

“They are confidential as well.”

And I just snapped. I darted towards him as fast as I only could to seize him by the throat and press his light body to the wall behind his chair. In the meantime, Jo ran round the table to his computer and started viewing the photographs while I was choking the director of the hospital with maniacal pleasure. If I didn’t already like her much enough, I would definitely begin to at this moment.

“Found him!” she exclaimed. “He’s here under the name of one Patrick Gordon suffering from a mix of paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder who was submitted four years ago and is marked as a resident of the building for violent patients.” She drew herself up and turned towards the director, “I know that it’s against the rules and all that jazz, but you will take us there or my friend here will squeeze his fingers a little bit tighter in one second. What do you prefer to happen next?”

Of course, he chose to bring us along to that building and, respectively, to the ward in which that Patrick Gordon was held. For him, it was the lesser of two evils.

When the door of that ward opened, we saw the fair-haired man in a white straitjacket sitting on the floor with an air of abstraction and staring into the emptiness. Having rushed to him, Jo fell on her knees before him and cupped his face to raise it and look him in the eye.

“Adam?” She shook him in order to wake to activity. “Adam!” She tried shaking him more intensively, she tried slapping him in the face, she tried yelling at him; however, heavily overdosed on antipsychotic drugs, he didn’t react to any of her approaches. At last, she jumped at her feet, drawing her phone out of the pocket, “I’m calling Harry.”

Jo whisked into the small space between me frozen on the threshold and the doorframe to get back to the corridor and didn’t think any longer of what she’d just experienced. She could do that. I couldn’t. I stood there, unable to tear my eyes off him, and there was the only one thought hammering in my temples, pulsating in my veins instead of my heart rate, - “ _I did this to him_ ”. And this thought was more than I was possibly capable of enduring, so I spun around on my heels sharply and walked out.


	4. Monsters

I stood on the pavement of Finsbury Circus facing the short road to London Wall street and, looking at the monument in the centre of that road, I saw the building that didn’t exist anymore. Its large widows and annoyingly endless corridors, its small cells and enormous chambers, its barbaric doctors and miserable patients. And the light of a candle blowing out above my head.

“Adam!”

I wasn’t surprised to have been hailed by Jo’s voice. Of us all in Section D, she was the only one who still had what she herself once called ‘human skills’ because she hadn’t had enough time to harden yet. She still cared. Especially about me since I was that idiot who had recruited her for MI5.

“How did you find me?” With reluctance, I shifted my eyes from the invisible building to her when she came up to me so close that I wouldn’t have to shout to be heard by her.

“Well, I called on your home phone to check up on you, and, as it turned out, Jenny didn’t even know that you had been already discharged from hospital,” she shrugged to hide her discomfort caused by her prying into my private life. “I kind of freaked out and tracked your mobile phone.”

However touched I was by her concern about me, I didn’t deign to refrain from teasing her with a good-natured smile, “In other words, you’ve been spying on me.”

“I’m a spy, Adam. Just like you.” Judging by her tone, she was offended. “And besides, I was right to be worried. It’s past 7am, you spent the night the devil knows where instead of being at home with your son, and now you’re here, staring into the emptiness as if it means something to you.”

I smiled. “Did you know that Bethlem Royal hospital had been moved three times before settling down in Bromley? It was located right over there—“ I pointed at the monument, “from 1634 to 1791.”

“Considering that I was a journalist prior to joining MI5,” she noted thoughtfully, “I can recognise the story when I see one, and this very fact that you’ve been researching Bethlem Royal hospital puts me onto the idea that there is some kind of a story between it and you and DI McGraw.”

“What kind of a story?”

“I don’t know.” Jo shrugged again. “It’s just that he dropped by in the Grid all of a sudden, took a look at the map, poked his finger into some random place on it, and there you were.”

“He’s a police officer. They’re trained to connect the dots and save lives just as we the spies are trained to shake off surveillance and smell secrets.”

“Police officers aren’t trained to walk out on people in the condition you were. And he didn’t ask after you. Not once. As if he hadn’t been there and hadn’t seen what I’d seen.”

“Asylums can be very depressing, so I don’t blame him for neither of that.” Eager to change the subject or, better yet, discontinue this entire conversation, I looked at my watch – it was around 8 o’clock and it wasn’t a fast ride from Moorgate to Milbank at this time of day. “Give me a lift to the Grid, please?”

Fortunately, she knew me well enough not to try to send me home by reminding me that technically, I was still on sick leave, and I was thankful to her for that. Silent, we went to her car parked on Bloomflied street, got in and drove along the quay of the River Thames towards Milbank.

Nobody expected of me to show up at work today, yet I was given a warm welcome. Everyone considered it to be their duty to shake my hand. Some, depending on how well we were acquainted, either hugged me or hugged me and kissed my cheek in so doing. Positively, it never ceased to amaze me that people of our occupation who lied to their families, their children, their significant ones, and the rest of the world on a regular basis could hold each other this dear.

“Guys!” I spread my arms in pretended shock when I reached my desk and found a big heap of chocolate of different sorts on it. “Am I really supposed to eat it all?”

“We will be happy to help,” Dimitri said mockingly, and they laughed all at once.

“I hope you will be equally happy to fill me in on what I’ve missed after I talk to Harry,” I responded in the same tone, taking my coat off and putting in on a hanger a step away from my chair.

As far as I could judge, Harry was in his office with somebody whom I didn’t see from our enormous room crammed with desks, chairs, hangers, and dustbins, and full of background buzzing and phone ringing. Rolling the sleeves of my shirt up while walking, I proceeded to its door and opened it.

“Morning!”

Harry broke his intense eye contact with none other than DI James McGraw in the flesh – their conversation wasn’t a pleasant one to all appearance - and directed his full attention to me, “Adam, shouldn’t you be in hospital?”

“I got cleared yesterday, and before you’ll say it, I’m absolutely not going home.” I wrinkled my nose, “I won’t survive yet another week of watching Manchester United lose one game after another. If a blow on the head and some fancy psychiatric drugs didn’t kill me, that definitely will.”

For a while, he simply stared at me in his usual Sir-Harry-Pearce-KBE style. “All right,” he nodded shortly at last. “When do you plan to be debriefed?”

“In ten minutes, I think.”

He nodded again, “Pop in when you’re done.”

Closing the door, I noticed that DI McGraw was scrutinizing the contents of the cup he held in his right arm in order not to look at me, and it unwittingly reminded me of him avoiding looking at me on the day when I was arrested by City of London police. Back then, it perplexed me because before that, a police officer had never felt guilty about bringing me in. At present, I was almost sure that I knew why he’d been ashamed, and it really made me question my own sanity.

“Debrief in ten minutes,” I announced to the team and headed to our kitchen.

I needed to drink at least two cups of coffee to remain functional and exclusively focused on work. I hadn’t sleep in three days by now because every time I closed my eyes, I was dragged back to the darkness of Bedlam as Bethlem Royal hospital was called in former times. Time after time, I found myself wandering around it - the modern one and the old one, oddly intertwined with each other, - as both me and the man who lived in the 18th century. His name I still couldn’t catch in the stream of his thoughts and recollections about this darned place and his life in general.

Thankfully, while I was awake, I was able to keep him at the bay, so to remain awake as long as possible for a human being, I poured one cup of robust coffee into myself within the next five minutes and took the second one along to the conference room. Everyone was already there, including Ros Myers who ordinarily acted as Chief of London Section D in my absence.

“As of today, we didn’t make any progress,” she stated dryly as soon as I sat down at the long conference table opposite her and placed the cup in front of me. “Nothing was stolen from the Brazilian embassy, which proves that they were after us, not the Brazilians, and a good half of the intruders was killed by the police and the embassy security during the attack. None appeared to be a member of the Walrus crew, but many were identified as IRA soldiers. Allegedly, they were hired through Anne Bonny’s assistance to be used as a human shield of sorts whereas the crew was meant to abduct Harry.”

“They haven’t left the UK yet,” Dimitri added. “I spoke to the MCA, and they’ve been searching every boat sailing off our shores and the French have been doing the same on their side of the channel. Nothing came up so far. During last week, nobody tried to approach John Silver and Max who are, as before, in Paris enjoying their romantic getaway. We think that the crew has dispersed in south-eastern England. The police actually caught a few of them, thanks to our police liaison DI McGraw who’s been very helpful, but they’re all small fries, though, no major players, and they’re not talking.”

“It would be easier if we knew why they’d targeted us,” Ruth admitted, twiddling her pen. “Did they ask you about something? Anything at all?”

“No,” I shook my head. “I was either out or high most of the time, so they didn’t have a chance to have their heart-to-heart with me. Apparently, they counted on keeping me overdosed for a couple of weeks to start interrogate me after I lose my touch with reality. Pretty clever of them, I have to say.”

“So, what?” It was Jo this time. “We’re, as the Americans say, back to square one?”

“Not exactly so,” I took some time to revise the options we had left cursorily in my mind by sipping coffee. “Okay,” I returned the cup on its spot several minutes, “What do we know? They’d targeted us. Therefore, the information we were given by our asset had been leaked to us intentionally, with the purpose of luring us into the embassy where they could have abducted Harry and abducted me instead. The question is - who is behind it? Whoever it is, he or she knew that we wouldn’t treat the tip-off from this particular asset as something unworthy of our attention, not to mention – our intervention, because he’d never let us down before. And that isn’t the knowledge one can purchase in the streets. Ruth?”

“I’m onto it.”

“Then, we still have Anne Bonny,” I paused to sip my coffee again. “She provided them with cannon fodder. Why wouldn’t she help them to disappear? If they can’t leave UK soil, they must lay low somewhere until it’s safe to cross the channel again, and they wouldn’t have recourse to the IRA because this is where we would be looking for them in the first place. We did and ended up empty-handed. However, the Irish mob could very well be harbouring them out of principle. They hate the British, and, as they say, ‘an enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Also, they tend to do business with the IRA every now and again. I refuse to believe that Ms Bonny doesn’t know the right people in this respect. Dimitri, since we have the police on board with a far larger manpower than ours, use them to make raids, but quietly and carefully, we don’t need this to escalate into Irish riots in major cities.”

“Got it.”

I looked at Jo, “You will go to Bromley and try to turn Anne Bonny. If she’s as tightly connected to the Walrus crew as I think she is, she’s our best shot at taking them down, all at the same time.”

Ros disagreed with me immediately, “Adam, we attempted to turn her twice. Neither went well. That, and why Jo? I’m more experienced in fast recurring, which in important so long as we don’t have time to brainwash her properly. I’d handle this damsel with lack of social skills and daddy issues much better.”

“Well, I suspect that we’ve got it all wrong previously,” I said slowly. “First, we tried to set her against her father on the premise that she hates him enough to betray, then we wanted to plant a mole in her entourage. After that, I would have sent our officers back to us in pieces, too, if I were in her shoes. Still, I had a chat about her with an old friend of mine from Belfast right before the attack on the Brazilian embassy, and, according to him, she has this itch that she has scratched every time her beloved husband Jack Rackham goes to prison – and he’s in prison at the moment – by cheating on him with girls. No offense, Ros, but of the two of you, Jo is more good-looking and approachable. Besides, in contrast with you, she doesn’t speak French. So, she’s to turn Anne Bonny, and you’re going to Paris because, as we all know, the French can be very sloppy when it comes to doing a foreign intelligence agency favours, so we need to keep our own eye on Silver and Max. Something prompts me that they’ve already been contacted by their crew or Anne Bonny somehow and are fooling us all right now by loafing around Paris. I’ll get this cleared with Harry so that you’ll have MI6 support in the field.”

“Fair enough.” Ros had always been capable of seeing through the obvious, and she caught the meaning of her assignment straight away without my further elaborating on what I wanted her to do.

Hereon, the debrief was over. Having drank up the rest of my coffee, I asked Jo to put my cup to my desk and went back to Harry’s office. To my surprise, DI McGraw still was there.

“Close the door, please,” Harry commanded in his typical Sandhurst manner. As I did it, he settled back in his chair and stared at me thoughtfully. “To be honest, I intended playing it differently, but since you’re back, I think we should proceed with our Hamilton operation as planned.”

This took me by surprise. “Wasn’t my cover blown when the police busted me? I understand that you had to get me out as fast as possible in the light of the preparing attack on the Brazilian embassy, but seized during the raid of firearms traffickers and released after two hours behind bars? I’m sure as hell an undercover cop. If not worse.”

“Unless you have a dirty police officer on your payroll at that station.”

At first, I was unable to make out what he implied. Suddenly, it hit home and I pointed at the man in his late thirties with dark red hair and bristle sitting on the chair across the table from Harry, “Him?”

“DI McGraw has kindly agreed to participate in our operation.”

This must have been what they discussed earlier this morning. Although, as Harry, I saw all the benefits of this supposed collaboration and no later than a week ago, I would have jumped at this idea without hesitation, my first reaction, nevertheless, was to dismiss it without giving it a second thought. For the reason that I was torn apart inside by two opposite personalities. On the one hand, there was Adam Carter, long deformed by his profession of an intelligence officer into a resourceful, remorseless, and hypocritical son of a bitch, who exploited people right and left. On the other hand, there was this man without a name, a sophisticated, compassionate, and idealistic British aristocrat, who never betrayed anyone in his life. Who wanted to protect DI McGraw by all means because he knew why he was about to jeopardize himself and demanded from me to stop him in one way or another.

“If it ever comes to light,” I decided to let him have his shot, already worn-out by this fight that’d been lasting for a week by this moment, “It will ruin his career.”

“I’ve already made the career I could only make in Guthrie’s police force,” DI McGraw brushed it off with perfect calm. “There is no way to advance it any further because he has too many protégés on every level of his chain of command, so if I’m reduced to the rank of Constable, I’ll simply take my time to make it back to DI and into Central Task Force or somewhere else.”

Strangely enough, he spoke English with the same Scottish accent as that ginger-haired, light-skinned, freckled son of a carpenter whom he was three hundred years ago, according to my nameless aristocratic friend from the past. They even looked alike – same features, same posture, same mimics, same gestures, and same eyes, whose colour was a weird mix of grey and dark blue colours.

“Probably, I don’t know much about the police,” I made the last covert attempt to talk him out of getting in bed with MI5, “but I suspect that for your colleagues, you’ll be a pariah, if not a monster.”

“The police need its monsters,” he shrugged. “As this society in general.”

_He remembered it as if it occurred yesterday, that day when he heard Lieutenant McGraw of the Royal Navy saying something similar to him. That day, they were walking along the pier side by side, heading to the spot from which they would be watching some pirate be hanged pretty soon._

_“What is this exercise intended to prove, Lieutenant?”_

_“You want to understand why piracy flourishes in the West Indies,” McGraw explained willingly. He was quite sure of his rightness back then. “I’m about to show you. Have you seen one of these before?”_

_“I’m afraid I haven’t, no. Who is he?”_

_“Davey someone-or-other,” Lieutenant shrugged scornfully. “High seas piracy, treason, so on and so forth, same as the last, same as the next. He’s being asked if he wants to confess, beg forgiveness in the eyes of God and Queen Anne.”_

_As if in reply to his words, the sentenced man yelled, “Suck my cock!”_

_“I assume that was a ‘no’,” he felt not quite at ease there, surrounded by unceremonious commoners and sailors. “So this is the lesson… the pirates of New Providence Island are incorrigible, dedicated to mayhem. To attempt to address this subject is doomed to defeat from the outset.”_

_“It’s not him I wanted you to see,” McGraw looked around, meaning the crowd that welcomed that pirate’s death with approving screams and applause. “It’s them. Civilization needs its monsters.”_

When I heard him saying this variation of those words in our reality, it suddenly dawned upon me that I, most likely, wasn’t alone who’d regressed to the beginning of the 18th century. Therefore, everything he’d been doing recently, he did to atone for what he felt ashamed of, and I asked myself – who was I to stand in his way? If, perhaps, that was what we’d been brought together in this life for.


	5. Unspoken

Thomas Hamilton, an overgrown booby, was a member of the big criminal organisation trading in illegal firearms and stolen goods. Its leader Mr Scott, whose real name was Ibrahim ibn Farsuk, and I met when I, then an MI6 officer, was stationed in Syria. I happened to save his black ass from the Syrian intelligence, so he was more than happy to return the favour by hiring me under this alias to do the legwork for him, knowing that if caught, I wouldn’t sell him to City of London police in any case. He also never bothered asking what I was busy with besides working for him so that he, if caught, couldn’t sell me to whoever offered the decent price for my head, either.

As soon as I returned to Tower Hamlets, one of the worst boroughs of London due to high crime rate and poverty and drug trafficking, disguised as Hamilton, Mr Scott overloaded me with orders because after the roundup that sent most of his couriers straight to prison he was short of hands. Thus, I had the cover, allowing me to track down Benjamin Hornigold nicknamed Captain, the retired Naval officer from Norfolk, turned into a smuggler. It took a great deal more time for me to find his base in East India Docks than I thought it would because Hornigold was one cautious old fox who had been plying between France, Portugal, Spain, and England for years and hadn’t been exposed once so far.

Eventually, I even managed to nose out when he was expected to be back in town from his regular voyage to Lisbon and a few hours prior to his arrival, I had scheduled lunch with DI McGraw in a random café. As usual, he was ten-minute late. He always was late – from five to twenty minutes on the average – and never troubled himself with calling me although he had my burner phone number. No doubt it would have annoyed me like hell, hadn’t I run him through all the databases MI5 had access to before leaving the Grid on that day when Harry offered me to use him to patch up my half-blown cover.

It turned out that he was two years older than me, and I was thirty-four. He was born in Ellon, the town located to the north of Aberdeen. His father, Alfred McGraw, was old Scottish nobility and a second-rate politician married to Sarah Fraser, the daughter of a former mayor of Glasgow. During his childhood, James was expelled from two dozens of boarding schools as well as private schools for misconduct and academic failure and graduated subsequently from an out-of-the-way publicly funded school with the worst marks I’d ever seen. Then he disappeared for three years and resurfaced at University of Bristol where he studied Politics and Spanish and, surprisingly, was a high achiever. After that, he joined the police and was trained at Hampshire Police Academy. He made his career by himself – from Constable patrolling the streets of Portsmouth to Detective Inspector in City of London police. Somewhere in between he got married, but I didn’t have time to read anything about his wife because I had to pick up my son from school and drive him to my parents living in Southampton. Not exactly a short ride. However, I spared a minute to call my own childhood friend lecturing at Hampshire Police Academy and working in Southampton Constabulary to make inquiries about our temporary police liaison. “McGraw? Good cop, bad temper,” he said, “Not a shitty person, though.” Later on, I received evidence myself that DI McGraw wasn’t notable for either talkativeness or amicability, which made us the direct opposites, and sometimes I was under impression that I seriously got on his nerves.

At any rate, I didn’t regret letting him get involved in this MI5 operation because he no longer avoided looking me in the eye and I sensed that he felt far less uncomfortable in my presence now. Besides, as opposed to other police officers who ceased to understand why they should walk around or stay in the background instead of breaking in or being in the spotlight, he really got it. Why he should call me Thomas or look over his shoulder going to meet with me. He was extremely careful not to bring any unwanted company along so that I couldn’t be made through him. At first, I double-checked for my own sake, but I realised quickly enough that even if his counter-surveillance skills left way too much to be desired in comparison with mine, he did know how to melt into the crowd without a trace. Once I asked him where he learnt how to disappear, and the reply was, “I haven’t always been a cop”. No further explanation followed, and however curious I was, I stopped asking any questions. After all, my parents had raised a proper well-mannered Englishman, not some unceremonious foreign asshole.

Having showed up at last, DI McGraw put two folders on a narrow shelf functioning as the table by the window looking out on the street in this café and sat on the high-legged stool at my right. It stood so close to mine that our knees touched slightly, within reason, but it, for some reason, was a bit too much for me to be able to concentrate in full on anything, except for it. He shot a glance at the half-empty cup of black coffee in front of me and didn’t comment on it although I was ready to go, “Yeah, that’s my third cup in a row today because I don’t have time to sleep. So what?”

To make semblance of his being a dirty cop, we met twice a week now here, now there: I gave him leads for the cases he investigated, which I honestly collected, travelling London back and forth round the clocks, and he kept me posed on what Section D was doing. It’d been two weeks since I went undercover, and everything was quiet: Ros was shadowing Silver and Max in Paris, Jo was romancing Anne Bonny in Bromley, and Dimitri was searching the Irish mob’s gatherings methodically. That was in one of his folders – the photographs of the members of the Walrus crew detained thanks to the police raids authorised by Dimitri. McGraw brought them along every time for me to identify those among them who were responsible for my abduction. I hadn’t recognised any of them till today.

“These two,” I pointed at a Latin American in his twenties and a black man in his forties. “The driver, and the second one submitted me to Bethlem Royal Hospital.”

The fact that I’d seen their faces could mean the only thing – they’d planned to kill me off after I told them what they wanted to know. That didn’t disturb me one iota. For a spy, especially of my security clearance, chances to get out alive of the situation of that kind were scanty by default, and I’d made my peace with it long ago, but him, this revelation seemed to have unsettled a lot.

In silence, he closed this folder and handed the other over to me. Inside, I saw the colourful photographs of a crime scene and a dead body that was that asset of ours who had tipped us off about the attack on the Brazilian embassy. I went straight for the autopsy report and scanned it.

“Suicide?!”

“Suicides are messy,” McGraw shrugged. “Not as messy as murders, but still. Look at him – he lies as if he is already in a coffin and all is clear around as if he cleaned after himself before climbing onto the bed. Provided that he did swallowed all those pills voluntarily because he did want to kick the bucket as soon as possible, would he be lying in that pose while dying? All the time?”

“So, murder?”

“An ordered hit, I’d rather say. You noticed that book on the nightstand?” He leaned forward to me to shove his finger into it in one of the photographs. This movement of his pressed his knees to mine and I, all of a sudden, lost the thread of the conversation for a few seconds. “It’s Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the pirate ship named the Walrus is mentioned in it on occasions along with Long John Silver and treasure Captain Flint hid on some island in the Caribbean sea. Coincidence?”

I slammed the folder to put it aside, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

I had to lie to him. Whatever Harry had had him sighed, it wasn’t sufficient for giving him access to classified information sensitive for national security, which Harry and I had been additionally banned from disclosing by Home Secretary in person. Even my team didn’t know the whole story. On the other hand, this murder proved my initial theory. Somebody did know about L’Urca de Lima and wanted to find out where it was relocated after a small part of it had been stolen by one of its guards who’d run into debt with his bookmaker and attempted to pay it off with it but was caught red-handed. Hornigold was the eldest brother of that bookie. If he told anyone, it must have been him, and who knew whom Honrigold told or who overheard their conversation accidentally or intentionally. All of that, I was going to find out in a couple of hours when Hornigold finally moored in London.

Before that, I had to do an errand for Mr Scott, so I drained the rest of coffee in one gulp and, with hidden relief, rose from the table. The longer this fight with the inner necessity to embrace the weirdest outcome of the heaviest drug overdose I’d ever been through in my life lasted, the more I inclined to the unpleasant thought that I wasn’t meant to win it. Even if I parted from McGraw once and for all, not for the next couple of days.

My trip to Marlow took a bit longer that I planned, and by the late afternoon, when I reached East India Docks, Hornigold’s ship was already there. I entered a single-storey building with a lighthouse made of greenish grey brick and saw Captain standing in the centre of it, by some motorboat on plies, surrounded by his men. Having approached this crowd, I was astonished to hear DI McGraw’s voice speaking to Hornigold. I was too far to be able to listen to their conversation; none the less, I detected something in Captain’s tone indicating that it wasn’t going to end well. Maybe, it was just years of experience kicking in. After all, going into the field without any support to deal with high-risk situations repeatedly, you learn very fast to spot every slightest detail that could cost you your life, whatever it might be. This was that detail, so I wedged myself into his crew and elbowed my way to McGraw.

“Captain, it’s nice to have you back,” I acted out my appearance on the scene as the easy-going goof Thomas Hamilton would conduct himself if he existed. “Mr Scott sends his regards.”

“Oh Tommy boy!” Captain smirked, dipping his hand into the pocket of his down-padded coat, and before I knew it, there was a loaded gun aimed at me. “Or, perhaps, I should call you Adam Carter?”

In a matter of seconds, the crew followed his example by levelling firearms at me and McGraw.

“Who’s the fuck Adam Carter?” I still was making out myself as a simple-hearted fool.

As an answer, Hornigold fished something out of his other pocket and threw that at my feet. I squatted slowly to pick it up. It was a black-and-white picture of my mother and me with my son Wes posing during his last birthday party for my father who was the main photographer in our family. I clenched my teeth in attempt to choke my anger. That eight-years-old boy was the only and last reminder of my wonderful wife Fiona Carter I had left. I’d found my way to get over her death – no matter how one might look at it, we both were MI6 officers and knew that either of us could be killed on duty – but our son… The boy we shouldn’t have let ourselves have… This photograph alone was more than enough to set me on the warpath. Regardless of the danger that might expose me and McGraw to.

Having straighten up, I folded the picture and hid it in the pocket of my khaki parka. Then I walked towards Hornigold, ignoring his gun, which baffled him. One blow performed by both hands, a few simple movements, and I was shielded from the crew with the body of Captain who had hard time processing what had just been done to him and why this gun was placed against his temple now.

“Come on, girls,” I commanded the crowd in my famous impatient-of-contradiction tone, “Put your toys down until you shoot each other dead. Or I will put the bullet through your captain’s head.”

They obeyed reluctantly, giving me piercing looks. As soon as all their guns were on the floor, I stepped back, leading Hornigold along, and said to McGraw in passing, “After you.”

I had no illusions about getting off this light, though. Neither did he, apparently, because when we made our way out of the building successfully and I sent Hornigold into the blackout by striking the back of his head with the gun, we broke into a run without preliminary collusion. I could have murdered Hornigold unhesitatingly for having the picture of my son, to be honest, but the smuggling naval crews were well-known for over-loyalty to their captains. Shortly, they would come running for him, and had they found Hornigold dead or heavily injured, McGraw and I both would have headed their kill list. The crew didn’t keep us waiting. As they rushed out of the building, they bumped into their Captain lying on the ground and began shooting at us in rage before checking his pulse first. We ran along the pier under this insane fire and jumped down into the nearest motorboat. McGraw untied it, I started the engine.

Five minute later, we already were in the middle of the River Thames: I was driving us away heading south, he was watching our back. However, it was still early to rejoice.

“RPG!” McGraw suddenly roared behind me.

In the next second, the missile hit the motorboat and the blast wave threw us overboard. I tumbled down into water with a plop that deafened and disoriented me for a while. By the moment, I managed to take my body under control, my feet had almost touched the bottom of the river. Thankfully, I was a good swimmer and coming to surface was a piece of cake for me. However, having emerged, I noticed that McGraw was nowhere to be seen, which left me with the only possibility – he’d drowned. I drew a deep breath and dove. I did it again and again because it was bloody hard to see my own hands before my nose in dirty water, let alone another human being at some distance from me.

By a miracle, as I dove for the umpteenth time, I smashed right into him. I put my arms around his chest and carried him along to surface to swim then to the argillaceous bank nearby the small pier on the opposite side of the river. There, I dragged him out of water and laid on his back. The rest I’d done so many times during my training as an MI6 officer that I didn’t even think of what I was doing now. I just kept doing it until he twitched and started spitting water out to clear his throat and lungs.

“You could have told me that you’ve failed a swimming test at the police academy before we got into that motorboat, you know,” I sat down on my knees, tired of being in the kneeling position.

“I can’t swim for the life of me,” he grumbled, combing wet hair away from his forehead with the help of his fingers. “I’m afraid of water.” Somehow, I couldn’t help laughing – maybe, out of simple relief that he was going to live – which, in turn, made him sit up abruptly and snarl, “Not funny!”

Unexpectedly, blood appeared on his face, streaming down his right temple. I stretched out my hand to move his hair away from its source and saw a deep wound hidden under them. He must have been hit in the head by something after the motorboat went off and lost consciousness in water.

“We need to get you to the hospital.”

“Like hell we do.”

I barely managed to resist the urge to burst out laughing again. “You’re afraid of doctors?”

He gave me such a sizzling look that if it were possible, I would have been incinerated on the spot in a flash. As our eyes met, I became extremely well aware that we sat side by side, with his hip pressed to my knees, and there was almost no space between us. Maybe, there was something in his eyes. Maybe, it was the heat of the moment. I wouldn’t know. I just leaned forward and kissed him.

His reaction to it could be described as total shock, which wasn’t what I’d expected. Not that I knew what I’d expected, but not that he would freeze instead of kissing me back, for damn sure. Nevertheless, I wasn’t mad at him or something. I liked it or not, it was entirely my fault because I’d assumed that he remembered as much as I did and it never occurred to me that he might haven’t regressed to the past as fully as I had. Moreover, I didn’t even have the slightest idea about when his episodes of regressing had started and how and why and what it was like for him to go through them. Whether it was something different from what I had been experiencing or not. Whether he could sleep at night without dreaming of the weird places he’d never been to. Whether those places and people he’d never met in his real life haunted him in broad daylight. Whether he questioned his mental state because that British aristocrat Lieutenant McGraw was in love with and I were quite alike outwardly. Whether he had this unconquerable urge to prove to himself in one way or another that this man whom he had been in the 18th century did exist and wasn’t the figment of his imagination. Whether…

I should have asked him of that all, and even more, yet I never did. What was my excuse? I’d rather treat it as my problem than ours. In fact, regardless of what he might have recalled, it was my problem for now on. For the reason that recollections were recollections, feelings were feelings, and I, Adam Carter, apparently, did have my own, pretty real feelings to him. Whether they were provoked by those recollections or not. Whether I wanted to have them or not.

“I’m sorry,” I moved back and stared thoughtfully at his bleeding wound in order not to look him in the face. I wasn’t prepared morally to see the shock I’d sensed just only in his eyes. That would be too much to bear. “We should do something about your wound. And I have to call Harry.”

I didn’t attempt to check my burner phone. It was too old and outdated to remain in working order after our heat in the Thames. McGraw stuck his hand into his brown leather jacket’s pocket and took out his phone that, judging by its black screen and inability to turn on, was dead as well.

This didn’t discourage him, “I live nearby. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from here or so. You can call him from my house.”

However, when he tried to get up together with me, he swayed because his head must have spun for a moment and would have fallen back on the ground if I didn’t catch him.

“You really think it’s a good idea to go on foot?”

He snorted, “Look at us. You think we can flag down a cab?”

I couldn’t deny his rightness: we both were wet to the skin, dirtied with clay, algae, and who knew what else, and, to crown it all, his face was half-covered with fresh blood.

“Okay,” I nodded. “Show the way.”


	6. Miranda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few ideas for the Hamiltons' backstory were borrowed from my friend astrangegirlsmind on Tumblr. Thank you very much!

He lived in Charlton, five minutes away from Maryon Wilson Park. It was already quite dark outside when we reached his house, a boring two-storeyed brick structure hidden among similar buildings that were highly typical of England. Its interior, however, was fashionably eclectic. Especially, in the living room where Latin American motives were rife and rampant. This didn’t accord in my mind with DI James McGraw as I knew him. On the other hand, I didn’t know him at all, I’d just deluded myself into thinking so, and his cooling reaction to my attempted kiss was the best proof of it.

Having taken off his leather jacket, which he tossed subsequently onto the sofa, he turned on the lights to find the phone. It stood on the nice coffee table by the electric fireplace and looked surprisingly European and minimalistic against the background of the other things I’d seen here.

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” he handed it to me. “It’s all the way back to the door and to the right.”

First of all, I rang my parents up to check up on them and Wes. My mother answered their home phone and was her usual self – charming, talkative, and caring. Luckily, they all were okay, nobody bothered them, so I had nothing to worry about. I wanted to speak to my son, but he’d gone to bed by that time. Afterwards, I called that childhood friend of mine from Southampton Constabulary with whom I’d discussed DI McGraw not so long ago to ask him to keep an eye on my family for me.

Harry Pearce was the last on my list. Frankly, since I thought he would be furious to hear that the extremely important operation had been torpedoed by my blown cover, I decided not to tell him about McGraw’s involvement. Instead, he took it unexpectedly easy. It could mean one or the other - either he knew what I didn’t know, or he had plan B in play. Or both, most probably. When I said that I was going to call a cab, he asked of my whereabouts to send Dimitri to pick me up. That was what I liked about him: you could mess up to the fullest and he would still look after you on trifles even if later on he would be summoned to Whitehall to be given an impressive dressing-down by Home Secretary or Prime Minister. This, as I suspected, was to happen tomorrow, first thing in the morning.

I returned the phone onto its spot and headed to the kitchen whose window looked out on the street. McGraw sat on a metallic stool with fancy legs at this stylish hybrid of a bar counter and a cupboard on which the large first aid kit lied open. Everything, starting with the bloodstained kitchen towel, seemed to indicate that he was unsuccessfully trying to stop the bleeding.

“You need to suture that wound of yours up.” With difficulty, I pulled off my soaking wet parka of khaki colour to drop it on the other stool, “And you definitely can’t do it yourself”.

Dragging up the sleeves of my black jumper, I came up to the kitchen sink. My hands were too dirty to touch anything, let alone a fresh wound. I must wash them clean before going anywhere near it. In the meanwhile, he had his chance to voice any objections he might have against what I’d suggested just now; nevertheless, he didn’t utter a word. Well, as far as I knew, silence gives consent.

He allowed me to remove his hand along with the bandage he was pressing to his head and sat motionless while I was tending and stitching it up. It took me aback. I would understand if he were an intelligence officer – we were trained to withstand torture of any kind, including going through sewing up the lacerated wound without anesthesia, but he was a civilian. In turn, it made me pounder over what the hell had happened to him, where and why he’d learnt to tolerate pain, how he – an openly clever, extraverted man from a good family – had transformed into an irritable, reserved ‘thing-in-itself’, considering that he’d been happily married for the last ten years. All of this simply didn’t add up for me, so, after I was done with the wound and dressed it, I risked trying my luck once again.

“You’re afraid of water because…” I walked to the fridge and opened it, “Well, my money is on that common ‘I nearly drowned when I was a kid’ story.” Searching for something suitable, I rummaged in the freezer until I found a middle-sized bag with chilled vegetables, “You’re afraid of doctors or hospitals or both because…” I closed the fridge, “What? Somebody died there?”

“You drink so much coffee because you’re afraid of falling asleep and having nightmares or you just want to have a heart attack?”

“To have a heart attack, I would need to have a heart, and I don’t have a heart.” I came back to him to apply that bag to his wound and press it to his head with his hand. This should be able to spare him edema and bruises party. “Not anymore.”

Silence reigned in the kitchen shortly after this exchange of caustic remarks. He was at a loss as to what to say in reply to this bitter truth about my heart died together with Fiona and I was busy washing his blood off my hands. It still hurt as red-hot iron would when I thought of her or worse when Wes mentioned her, yet it didn’t feel real any longer. Somehow, It’d become a thing of the past.

“Thank you,” McGraw suddenly broke this oppressive silence, “for saving my life.”

“I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t get under my feet!” I couldn’t help letting out a bit of my annoyance caused by both – what he’d just said about my caffeine addition and what had happened in East India Docks earlier today. “What the hell did you do there in the first place?”

“I know about L’Urca de Lima, Adam,” he leaned his elbows on the counter. It was the first time he called me by name. Before that, he never called me Thomas or Mr Hamilton nor did he use my real name once. “Just as you, seemingly, I went there to have a talk with Hornigold about it.”

“Harry told you?”

“The money that were found in your pockets when you were arrested…” He sighed. “I had their numbers checked by my friend. She informed me that the banknotes with such numbers were issued by Bank of England a few years ago and have been in circulation ever since. There was no way for their carbon copies issued two years ago to exist. Unless they are fake, but they aren’t. So I called one of my wife’s colleagues, the journalist who writes about financial frauds, and he enlightened me on the rumours circulating in certain circles that the British government had secretly authorised reissuing a large amount of the real banknotes within the Project L’Urca de Lima. Five billions of pounds, to be precise. Supposedly, those billions had been divided into equal parts between MI6, MI5, and Defence Intelligence to pay off their assets, trade on the black marker, cover the expenses of their off-book operations, or fund coups d’etait in targeted countries. Great story for the front page. Probably, for the Pulitzer Prize, too. If he had proof. As it turned out two days later, he was under surveillance. Whoever has been watching him, they called Harry because I frequented Section D. That morning when you got back to work, we had a chat about my investigation during which he strongly advised me to drop it.”

I was impressed. A vast majority of police officers wouldn’t know where to look or what to look at or else would be too lazy to dig as deep as he’d dug. Yet he appeared to be an unpolished boor on the face of it, a very observant, attentive, shrewd, and single-minded person was hidden behind this. Besides, he was afraid of nothing – excluding water and hospitals, of course – if he dared proceed with his off-hour investigation despite Harry’s warning. It commanded respect. In parallel, it also made it obvious that with his talents, traits, and skills, he was wasted banally in the police. Didn’t I promise myself to recruit only single individuals for MI5 after Fiona’s death so that nobody would have to go through what my son and I had gone, I would have found a much better use for him in my line of work.

And I was angry like hell. Maybe, it was the wedding ring on his left hand, which was such an eyesore to me. Maybe, it was this house screaming that it’d been decorated by his wife. Maybe, it was my feelings hurt by his having what I’d lost. I had no idea, and I was way too tired to restrain it.

“You didn’t, did you?” I folded my arms. “Instead, you found Hornigold somehow and foundered my operation. And why, most importantly? Because you got bored or something?”

“I didn’t have to search for Ben,” McGraw snorted condescendingly. “I always knew where to find him, so you could have saved yourself a lot of time by notifying me that you would like to meet with him, but you don’t need anyone, do you? You can do everything by yourself, can’t you?”

“For that to be useful, you should have notified me first that you’re well up on what has nothing to do with you or your bloody police work,” I snapped out.

“Wish I knew that it had every fucking single thing to do with your undercover operation,” he was about to lose his grip by the sound of his voice, “but not only you spies are so good at keeping your goddamn secrets, you also think that you have every right to take others for complete idiots.”

“That’s our job!”

Apparently, he didn’t have any forcible argument against it, and we just glared at each other as two battered stray dogs. Enraged, I wasn’t ready to admit even to myself that it wasn’t about our professional differences or our recent adventures. For the reason that if I did admit it, thereupon I would have to accept the plain fact that however much I wanted this fight to end up in bed – his, mine, on the floor, on the counter, no matter – it wasn’t going to happen. Not now, not ever.

“James?”

We were so carried away by our quarrel that we hadn’t heard the car driving up to the house nor had he heard the main door opening and somebody’s steps approaching. It was a surprise for both of us when a black-haired woman in olive green trench coat showed up on the kitchen’s threshold.

I stared at her, unable to believe my own eyes. It was her. Dressed differently, in trendy modern clothes that complimented her slim figure and ascetic features beyond all measure, she, nevertheless, wasn’t different at all. As if she had stepped right out of the 18th century that lied on the other side of that threshold. Her existence in this lifetime turned out to be purely overpowering and puzzling for me because previously, I’d regarded it as inconceivable that I could have met her one fine day. Yet here she was. Just as I remembered her – the beautiful, sophisticated, elegant, self-confident brunette.

She came up to him, stretching her arm to his head; however, before she managed to touch it, he jerked back and gave her a warning look. I was bowled out: he’d let me take a glance at his wound on the riverside, he let me patch it up here a while ago, and he didn’t want her to see it?

“It’s okay,” I addressed to her softly, seeing that she was worried sick, “I’ve tended it.”

She abruptly turned to me, “You should have taken him to hospital!”

“Miranda!”

His sudden shout sounded like a whistling crack of a whip. Whatever else she had to say to me, she swallowed it although as the lady of the house and his wife, she was within her right to let it all out. Additionally, she appeared to be so offended by his incredibly harsh tone that I immediately sensed another scandal hanging about at full speed, which I didn’t need to be present at for my own sake. In the light of it, car’s honking came from the outside very opportunely.

“I’ll show myself out,” I grabbed my parka and hurried to get off with a whole skin.

Having parked our working black Lexus SUV by the pavement right in front of the McGraw’ house, Dimitri didn’t stall the engine. I welcomed it with all my heart because by that moment, there was nothing what I would want more than to clear off from this unpretentious borough of East London as quick as possible. Mercifully, Dimitri drove off right after I got in and shut the door behind myself.

In passing, he cast a sidelong glance at me, “You look like shit.”

“We have a shitty job.”

He smiled cheerlessly, “That’s true.”

Having leaned my left elbow on the passenger door, I closed my eyes wearily and screened them from the outside world with the same hand. I hadn’t asked for it, but it all was coming back to me. Wave by wave. Moment by moment. Feeling by feeling. Fact by fact. Through his eyes.

_He was walking down the street when a covey of laughing girls darted out from nowhere. One of them bumped into him. The eldest. She was dressed modestly, this low-key beauty with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, whereas the others were clearly of noble birth. Afterwards, he was incapable of recalling whether they exchanged apologies and pleasantries or not. What remained embedded forever in his memory was her gentle fingers in his hand, the playful smile on her lips, her mellow voice with perfect articulation saying, “I am Ms Miranda Barlow, my lord”, and how he followed her leading away the girls who were under her charge with his eyes until they turned round the corner._

_Naturally, his father was dead set against his wish to marry her. They argued stubbornly for an hour or so. Finally, his father grew bored with repeating that the wife of his son couldn’t be a woman of low state who had to earn her keep and hearing the same answer time after time. “The dowry of my dear brother William’s highborn wife was decent. Unfortunately, he’s already dissipated all of it. Wouldn’t it be better for your eldest son and heir to be saved from such deplorable consequences of indulging his vices by getting married to an undowered woman? The knowledge of my inability to pay off my future debts with my wife’s money would make me think twice before staking my all at a card table.”_

_Their wedding wasn’t pompous or well-attended because neither of them wanted it to be. She wore a simple white dress; he had his best ensemble on. He gave a ring with turquoise, which was meant to serve as the wedding ring, and a pearl necklace as the wedding gift. She gave him this book in Spanish. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Since that day, she always gave him books because there was nothing else that he loved more than books. Since that day, people whispered behind his back wherever he appeared, “Is it possible he’s fully mad?”_

_Regardless, their married life was peaceful and unclouded. In her, he found his best friend and partner in crime. She shared his passion for books and rhetorical discussions. She was the gem of his salons gathered so many men of outstanding intelligence – poets, essayists, philosophers, painters, politicians, and scientists. She was the mistress of his house in London that she ran properly and without unnecessary expenses. She shone beside him at court and openly stood up for his progressive ideas._

_Initially, he was scared that once he let the cat out of the bag, she would leave him; however, she simply suggested that they would conclude this agreement, according to which she would be free to have affairs with men of her choice and he would turn a blind eye to her infidelity. He thought it wouldn’t work for them because he loved her too much to lose her to anyone, but it did. Whomever she was infatuated with at one time or another, she always returned to him. She would lurk into his bedroom in the middle of the night and curl up by his side to sleep off, satisfied and worn-out, or she would come home early in the morning and climb onto his bed to listen to him reading one of his books aloud._

_This idyll departed to God on the day when he introduced Lieutenant James McGraw, who sent by sea lords to consult him, to her. She fell in love with him almost at first sight. To her fortune, she was a woman with the husband who couldn’t care less about his reputation of a cuckold. She could act on her feelings and she did. He stepped aside and shielded her from talebearers with himself, but deep inside he envied her. In the world he was born and lived in, a man couldn’t be attracted to men, let alone to be in love with a man, and, even worse, he couldn’t count on reciprocal feelings. Wishing he had been in her shoes, he burnt with shame and desire and despair, which he hid behind the mask of the idealist completely devoted to his goal to save Nassau from piracy. Sometimes, it was too much to bear, and in the solitude of his office, he would drop a pen on the table and screen his closed eyes with his hands so that nobody could witness his pain and tiredness. Sometimes, he hated her. Sometimes, he hated him for ruining their perfect, measured life, but most of the time he hated himself for being who he was._

_That evening he remembered best of all. It was quite remarkable: Lieutenant James McGraw turned his almighty and absolutely intolerable father out of the house. The same house that belonged to his father. While with astonishment and disbelief, he was watching Lieutenant lecture his father, it suddenly dawned upon him that nobody would have ever done what this man was doing, sticking out his neck in passing, if there wasn’t something more to it than a friendship. He could think of the only way to prove or disprove this. He kissed him. Not at first try, though. Lieutenant was as shocked as anyone would be who didn’t know that it was quite realistic to long for intimate contact with another man when he came to him and put his hand on this shoulder to bring him closer. He shrunk back as he bended over to him. Nevertheless, he went for it again, and this time, Lieutenant McGraw let him kiss him._

_He never had enough of him. James always had to go somewhere – to the Admiralty, to sea, to the Bahamas. He couldn’t bear being apart, not seeing and touching him, so to be with him wherever he went, he gave James this book - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which he often read for him in bed after they got tired of rolling in the hay. With the inscription on its first page, “James, my truest love. Know no shame. T.H.”_

Having opened my eyes abruptly, I stared straight ahead, consumed with this sudden revelation and appalled by it. _“James, my truest love. Know no shame. T.H.”_ T.H. Thomas Hamilton.


	7. Headache

“If you don’t want to go to hospital,” Miranda tried to reach to my head anew as soon as the door closed behind Adam, “Let me at least take a look at your wound.”

I jerked my head away again, “It’s fine.”

The simple truth was that I came home injured quite often. It was both – the inseparable part of my job and the direct consequence of my own recklessness and impulsivity. Ordinarily, if hurt on duty, I would be examined by paramedics on the scene and sent home with attended wounds, so, in fact, it was the first time ever since we were introduced by my younger brother when she saw me like this.

Suddenly, I heard somebody playing the piano, and before I decided that the blow on the head I’d taken earlier today resulted in my having auditory hallucinations, there it was – that house with that big and musty room we fell out once over some book and my short memory – right in front of me.

_Having dismounted from a tall black horse, I tethered it to the porch’s railings and walked up the stairs. She was playing that piano. I discovered it as I thrust the door open. She stopped playing and turned round to glance at me. She was either annoyed by my appearance or worried. I wouldn’t know._

_“Take off your boots. I’ll boil some water.” She said to me prior to heading for the kitchen._

_Drained and overwhelmed with relief, I fell down on the floor. She would look after me. She always did. So, for a while, I could put on hold this war against the entire world and England, specifically, that I had been waging for the last ten years. I could forget about L’Urca de Lima. I could relax and get some much-needed rest. I leaned again the door with my back and closed my eyes. For the time being, I was safe in her plain house, in her good hands, surrounded by her love and ghosts of the past._

“James…” Miranda really was doing her best not to get offended by my behaviour. “Please.”

_In a white shirt, I sat on the wooden kitchen table, waiting for her to unwrap the pieces of white cloth wounded across my chest. She was visibly displeased by the way I’d been treated._

_She shook her head in disapproval, “Whoever tied this bandage was either blind or drunk.”_

_I spread his arms, “I think both.”_

_“Oh my God…” Her irritation burst out for a second when she had to tear off my chest the cloth stuck with time to one of my wound. “You couldn’t have told me about this last night?”_

_“It’s really not as bad as it looks.” I attempted to soothe her. I was capable of handling this and many other things with ease, yet I let out a groan as she touched the wound. “Is that really necessary?’”_

_She supressed her smile. Even in this artless dress that didn’t compliment her in the least, even as unremarkable as she was right now, even ten years older, she still was stunningly beautiful, covertly regal and incredibly strong despite everything we had been through. Despite everything we had lost._

I sighed and bended my head to her, trusting these feelings I’d experienced just now – of being in good hands that would do anything possible and impossible for you; of being loved unconditionally by this amazing woman regardless of who I might have become. Carefully, Miranda removed my hand with the bag of chilled vegetables and the temporary bandage Adam had applied to the wound.

“Whoever your friend is,” my wife was amazed, “he definitely knew what he was doing.”

For some reason, her words made me recall his hands – beautiful, long, slender, surpassingly soft for a man as I’d discovered when he kissed me and, in so doing, touched my face. The same hands I couldn’t help staring at, especially while he embraced his cup of coffee to warm them, nor could I stop thinking of them when he was away, living his own life. And he sewed my wound up using them.

“You shouldn’t have been rude to him,” I drew back to catch her eyes. “He didn’t deserve it.”

She was ashamed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that all of this—“ Miranda pointed at blood-stained medical supplies scattered about the kitchen counter, “Scared me the hell out of my mind.”

It didn’t scare him. He also hadn’t waited for the police or ambulance to come to our rescue. He didn’t relay on anyone but himself, and that had saved my life. Yet she attacked him for nothing. I couldn’t forgive her for that. Furthermore, I wasn’t even sure that one day, I would be able to forget her way to thank him for not leaving me in the river to the mercy of fate, which I wouldn’t have survived.

“I’m going to have a shower and go to bed.” Taught by the bitter experience, I leaned on the edge of the counter with both hands and got up slowly to prevent my head from spinning again.

“Our bed or your bed?”

It’d been two weeks since we had that fight on our tenth anniversary, and we’d never been at odds with each other any longer than that. We’d never apologized to each other: ordinarily, I would sleep in the living room until she let me know that she wouldn’t mind me sleeping in our bedroom again, then we would have reconciling sex and our life would go on as it went before. So, basically, this question implied that she’d cooled off properly and was ready to be back on speaking terms with me. The problem was that I was angry with her and a great deal angrier than I’d been until now.

“My bed.”

She looked offended, considering that I’d been a villain in that fight and, most likely, was expected to compensate her for that in one way or another. Nevertheless, she didn’t stop me when I headed to the steps to walk upstairs, nor did she try to speak to me when I returned downstairs after having a shower and changing my wet clothes. This meant in effect that, figuratively speaking, we’d come full circle and the next two weeks of mutual silence and ignoring each other had just begun.

I fell asleep just as I lied down and didn’t hear Miranda proceeding with her evening ritual – having dinner, taking a hot shower, reading a good book before going to bed or in bed.

I dreamt of that enormous old mansion again, but this time, there was no Miranda in her elegant corseted dresses wandering about it. It was empty – abandoned and lifeless. I dashed around the maze of its corridors, looking for the now-lost key to the door that led to the room where these voices – vaguely familiar voices – were coming from. They were arguing. Politely but fiercely.

_“What are you talking about, Thomas?”_

_“You asked me to formulate a plan. That’s what I’ve done.”_

_“Oh, for God’s sake! Lieutenant, am I right to assume that a proposal such as this…”_

Suddenly, there I was. Sitting at this long right-angled table. Miranda with a white plum in her jet-black hair sat in front of me, wearing a reddish-yellow dress, and there was my father in an ugly grey wig to the left of me. I also sensed that somebody else was present at this weird re-telling of the dinner we had on our tenth anniversary. That invisible elephant in the room, unnoticed by everyone but me. It was here, with us. I sensed it, somewhere on my right, and I couldn’t make myself look at it.

_“Lieutenant, I’ll ask you once again, am I to assume by your silence that you are in agreement with this proposal?”_

_I knew that I had to make a very serious decision. Right here, right now. Yet I hesitated, and Miranda tried to protect me from it. “The lieutenant has dutifully expressed his reservations…”_

_“Madam… You have done enough to damage the good name of this family. I would ask that you keep both your mouth and your legs firmly shut going forward…”_

_He could have gone on and on, insulting and humiliating her; however, I no longer wished to keep listening to it or any other things he might probably have to say. “I support it,” I stoop up, “I found this argument persuasive. I find his intent to be good and true, and I find yours wanting, sir. I will be relaying my findings to Admiral Hennessey in short order. And now I think it’s time you left, sir.”_

And he did leave. In the same manner as my father did on that day. Surprisingly, Miranda didn’t say anything although in reality, as I bore firmly in mind, she’d made a scene after his departure and we’d fell out. Instead, she turned her head in the direction where I stubbornly avoided looking this far. Obeying an inner urge, I followed her example this time, and there he was at the head of a table. Adam.

_He couldn’t help smiling. “Did you just ask my father to leave his own house?” Then he dragged off his white wig while his face grew serious, “Right now he will be dispatching messages to the Sea Lords, the Southern Secretary, his friends in the Privy Council. He will stop at nothing to ensure that this plan never sees the light of day.” He directed his eyes to me, “And now you’re in the line of fire.”_

_“People can say what they like about you, but you’re a good man,” I knew my tone would give me away, yet I didn’t care. “More people should say that, and someone should be willing to defend it.”_

_He rose from the table to come closer to me and kiss me. For the first time, not for the last. I started back initially because I didn’t expect this to happen someday, but then I just gave up struggling with this impossibly strong attraction to this man I’d been harbouring within to have it all, finally._

I woke up in a cold sweat just as I had a bit more than two weeks ago. Still, then it was only one terrifyingly realistic and logical nightmare followed by a single episode of hearing what hadn’t been said and seeing what hadn’t been there occurred at the Brazilian embassy where Adam had been abducted by the Walrus crew. Tonight, I had two similar episodes in a row and the weirdest nightmare ever.

After I was hit in the head.

Suddenly, I remembered Adam saying to Harry in my presence that he had been hit in the head by his kidnappers. Apparently, his forced insomnia in the form of an addiction to drinking coffee round the clocks started when he was in hospital. Up to that time, he had been fine, he’d even looked much better than recently and he’d hardly worked less than he did during the last two weeks.

This realisation made me feel like an idiot. I’d been so busy overcoming my shame towards him and figuring out what real Adam Carter was like that I’d missed obvious things. Let alone opportunities to ask him why being strongly against me participating in his undercover operation at first, he’d changed his mind as I’d told him that the police needed its monsters. Or why he didn’t ask me how I’d managed to find him in Bethlem Royal Hospital. I had an odd feeling that he knew how and that he hadn’t thanked me for releasing him from there because he also knew why I was looking for him, to begin with.

In addition to that, he was hurt by the kiss I hadn’t returned for the only reason that it’d literally taken me off guard and put in so utter confusion that I froze on the spot. He seemed to have expected some different reaction from me whereas I, with my hand upon my heart, hadn’t expected anything like this from him. After all, as I used to think, it was me who was obsessed with him all along, not the other way around, and there wasn’t any indication that he might reciprocate this obsession of mine, which unnoticeably for me, developed into full-scale sexual attraction. It was so demanding that if only my head wasn’t spinning and my legs weren’t weak in the knees a few hours ago, in the wake of exchanging remarks, I would have dragged him upstairs to that king-size bed Miranda and I slept in. Or we would have flapped everything onto the floor and made use of that kitchen counter my wife loved so much.

I was so stunned by all of this that my first impulse was to grab the phone – our home phone since my mobile phone was irreversibly dead thanks to bathing in the River Thames – and ring him up straight away. Unfortunately, I didn’t have his personal number. There was no point, either, in calling on his burner phone, which he must have already rid of since his cover, as he stated himself, was blown, and I questioned my ability to search out his London residence because he was trained to blend in and cover his tracks. Still, I had to go to Section D this morning. I’d done it after each meeting of ours to keep Harry posted. Harry should be in the know as to where Adam could be caught in the short run.

Having jumped out of my improvised bed on the sofa to change my clothes, I instinctively seized my head in my hands because, as it turned out, it was being racked by a hellish headache from within. With difficulty, I changed into my clean clothes and, afterwards, gulped down all the painkillers I’d dug up in the first aid kit with some water. This should made me able to drive. Thankfully, it did.

As soon as I entered Section D, I saw Harry in his office. There was no wonder that he whose working day started at 7 and ended at 10 of his own accord although officially his working hours were from 9 to 5 was already there. Ruth was here as well. No sight of Adam, though. So, I went to Harry.

“DI McGraw,” he raised his head from the papers he was reading, editing and remarking in the margin when I sat on the chair in front of his desk. “What do I owe your rudely early visit to?”

“I’m looking for Adam,” I crossed my legs, “and since he’s not here—“

“Oh, he is here,” Harry held up his right hand and beckoned somebody behind my back.

A minute later, Adam himself appeared on the threshold of his office with a customary cup of coffee. He’d erased every trait of Thomas Hamilton by shaving, taking a shower, combing his straw hair, and getting his own clothes on. In my opinion, he’d better have a nap for a few hours instead.

“Since DI McGraw is here,” Harry pointed at me, “and your operation has gone south—“

“It wasn’t his fault,” I interrupted him. “I had an argument with Benjamin Hornigold, which wasn’t going to end well because I was there without backup. Adam arrived just in time to save my ass.”

For a moment, Harry looked at me, not blinking, and then he shifted his eyes to Adam. It was how I guessed that Adam hadn’t told him about me talking to Hornigold at East India Docks yesterday.

“Why have I heard of it just now?” Harry’s tone didn’t herald anything good.

Adam shrugged, “How is that relevant? If it wasn’t him who had sold me out to Hornigold.”

“It is always relevant when you play the hero.”

“He’s a civilian, Harry!” Adam spread his arms. “What was I supposed to do?!”

“Your job!”

“Let me remind you why we’re doing this job,” the voice of Chief of London Section D became cold, dry, and rough. “We’re doing it so that ordinary people like him could get back home to their families every evening instead of dying in the reincarnation of the 7 July 2005 London bombings.”

Ruth peered into after knocking at the doorframe before Harry had time to respond. “Adam, your mother is on the phone. Line two.”

“Tell her I’ll call back.”

“Well, I suggested that she would call later or leave a message,” Ruth explained patiently, “but she insisted on speaking to you immediately. She said it’s emergency. Something about your son.”

Watching Harry move the landline phone standing on his desk closer to Adam, I noticed that he wasn’t surprised by this call as if he’d waited for it to happen. Nor he was glad that it’d happened.

Adam put the receiver to his left ear and pressed some button. “Mum, what’s the matter?”

For the next couple of minutes, he listened to her, gradually changing countenance – from overt perplexity and discontent caused by her persistence to thinly disguised rage and real fright.

“I’m on my way.” Having hung up, Adam looked questioningly at the head of the Counter-Terrorism department of MI5. “They can’t find Wes anywhere. His bedroom’s window appears to be open from the outside. The alarm system was disabled. Cops watching their house were knocked out.”

Harry nodded reservedly, and Adam darted off.

“Damn it,” Harry uttered quietly but feelingly. Following that, he glared at me ferociously and asked a bit irritatingly, “Why are you still here?! If you two are such good friends that he lies to me to have you covered, go with him and make sure he won’t commit any follies.”


	8. Trip

To be honest, I decided that Harry had joked about Adam and follies because in my personal opinion, Adam Carter never did stupid things. However, I was proven wrong quite fast.

While we still were in London, Adam bothered himself with following traffic regulations more or less not to be stopped by the police, but once we drove onto M3, he pedalled the gas right into the floor and started manoeuvring hell for leather between other cars on the motorway. He was an excellent driver, I would gladly to give him that at any other time, but today, ten minutes of this madness made my head spin, and shortly after, I had nausea rising to my throat. Considering that I’d never suffered from travel sickness before, I was likely to have got brain concussion in that motorboat explosion.

“If you do want to kill me this much,” I didn’t manage to sound less irritated and aggressive because I seemed to be about to throw up on my knees, “you could haven’t pulled me out of the river.”

“If you’re afraid of speed, you should have stayed behind.” Judging by his tone, not only he was angry with me beyond measure but also openly displeased with my company on this trip.

“I don’t give a damn about speed,” I growled. “It’s your driving that makes me sick!”

He cast a sidelong glance at me. I must have already been green because without saying anything else, he changed into the leftmost lane and slightly decelerated. I slipped down in my seat and closed my eyes not to see at what speed the car was tearing along now. In a while, I felt a bit better.

Still, I had no idea how I managed to survive the two-hour marathon from Milbank to, as it turned out when I finally opened my eyes and noticed the road sign, Southampton. Hampshire? I wanted to ask what the hell did we do in this county when he turned to M27, which led from Southampton to Portsmouth. All the way back to the worst days of my life. Mercifully, at some point, he turned again and, eventually, we fetched up somewhere in Titchfield, a quiet East Southampton borough. One of its sleepy provincial streets was blocked by the police cars at both ends.

Adam braked by the nearest roadblock and rolled down his window, “Adam Carter. I live there.”

It was the first time I heard him introducing himself by his full name in my presence. I knew that his real name was Adam thanks to his colleagues, but I didn’t know whether Carter was his real surname although Hornigold called him Adam Carter yesterday. It could very well be an alias. Yet it wasn’t.

As soon as police officers let us pass freely, Adam drove up to the well-attended two-storeyed house and parked the car on the place in front of it, side by side with Ford Focus hatchback of dark blue colour, which, apparently, belonged to the residents. Having got out of the car, he entered the building without ringing a bell and left the door open so that I could follow him. He led me to the comfortable, light living room where two men and a woman were chatting with each other in low voices.

“Adam!” The short, elegant woman in her sixties with familiar straw hair and a charming smile stood up from the sofa of light emerald colour at our sight.

“Morning, mum,” Adam embraced her and kissed her cheek. The tall brown-haired man with moustaches and familiar features was the next in the line. “Hi, dad.” Then, Adam shook hands warmly with the second man – of his age or so, in the police uniform. “Thanks for the buzz, John.”

“Couldn’t you introduce us to your friend, please?”

His mother’s polite question made Adam, who seemed to have forgotten about my existence, looked back at me, stopped in the doorway. Obviously, she was that person who had hammered good manners in his head. As well as many other things because she, too, was dressed very tastefully.

Adam stepped back so that we all could see each other clearly, “My parents – Angela and Peter Carter, and my old friend Superintendent John Stephens, Southampton Constabulary.” After that, he pointed at me and addressed to them, “Detective Inspector James McGraw, City of London police.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Mrs Carter smiled at me along with her husband.

Evidently, composure and friendliness ran in the family. They were visibly worried, yes, but they didn’t panic or writhe in hysterics what I witnessed way too frequently in my line of work when it came to talking to victims and their loved ones.

“Likewise,” I nodded shortly.

My manners had always been awful. Miranda had even tried to fix them so long as she had quite an active high-society life and I had to satisfy the spoken and unspoken obligations of etiquette. She hadn’t succeeded in that, predictably, since I’d let her lessons float past my ear. Right now I wished I hadn’t. For the first time in my life, I really cared about what people – or rather, these particular people, his parents – would think of me, and something prompted me that I was a huge disappointment.

“So, John,” Adam looked at his friend, “what do we have?”

The debrief was short: no fingerprints were found, the lock was picked, there were no traces of fighting, the cops watching the house were attacked from behind. Fast, clear, thought-out, professional. And no ransom call this far. Nothing at all. It got me thinking. The boy had been kidnapped a few hours after Hornigold hurled a black-and-white photograph at Adam’s feet. Assuming that his son was in it – and he must have been if Adam had gone berserk when he saw it – Ben, most probably, knew that Adam had the family living in Hampshire, an hour away from Isle of Wight, this mecca for smugglers.

“Adam, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

We went out to the garden on the other side of the house. It was unexpectedly large, well-kept, and enclosed by a lovely brick wall. Besides, it was quiet, isolated, and empty.

“Promise me that you will hear me out first.”

I came up to Adam so close that nobody else but him could hear me speaking and ended up standing almost face to face with him. Too close than I should have by rules of decency, but it felt right. Natural and comfortable. Yet it wasn’t anywhere close enough for me who was dying to re-live anew that astonishing physical intimacy taken place on the riverside between the moment when he brought me round and the moment when he kissed me and I ruined it all by my reaction.

He snorted. “I always do that.”

“You know, I may be terribly mistaken because I’ve made quite a few wild guesses,” I considered it to be my duty to forewarn him. “None the less, I think that your son is on Isle of Wight. Hornigold and his crew live in Yarmouth. Additionally, several member of his crew are former thieves who could get into a house and out of it just as it’d been done in our case. The problem is, we can’t call the local police. A good half of Isle of Wight’s population are smugglers. If cops start searching ships, boats, houses, and warehouses, they will forewarn Hornigold and he’ll disappear together with your boy at sea. We even can’t call Harry to get help from the MCA. It will scare him off as well if the MCA starts prowling around the island. All we can do – the only option we have, which is also our best shot, actually, in this situation – is to go there by ourselves. You and me. Without backup. Not telling anyone where we’re going. And pray for the element of surprise in passing. This, and I can’t guarantee that Wes is really there.”

He gazed at my face. Although I couldn’t read his mind, I did understand what was going on in his head. What I had suggested required from him to take a huge leap of faith on the ground of my assumptions. Was I wrong, it might cost us precious time, which was always absolutely crucial in kidnapping cases, - time that could be spent searching and following other leads – and his son’s life.

Suddenly, he swung and returned into the house. I followed him, confused.

“John,” Adam told his friend from the police, passing by on his way to the main door. “DI McGraw may have a lead or two. We’ll check them out, and if it’s something real, I will call you.”

To say that I was taken aback by the decision Adam had just made would be a hell of an understatement. Honestly, I thought all along he would turn my suggestion down. That was what I, probably, would have done if it had been my kid. I hadn’t expected of him to believe me or, most shockingly, listen to me and trust me. I was used to be distrusted because I’d never wanted anyone to trust me. I’d never needed it. I’d never cared about how untrustworthy I might seem to be just as I’d never truly cared about anyone but myself. I had my reasons to be distant and indifferent and selfish as hell, but for him, there wasn’t a single thing in the world I wouldn’t do. He was all that mattered, and I was ready to break my neck trying to find his son as long as it was all that mattered to him.

To disconnect myself from this range of feelings I was having before they drove me into a corner and I lost my grip, which wasn’t as firm as usually thanks to intensifying headache, I focused on what we were doing at present. Having left the house, we drove back to the centre of Southampton. In total, it took almost two hours for us to reach Yarmouth Harbour: twenty minutes to get to the Red Funnel Vehicle ferry terminal, one hour of sailing from Southampton to East Cowes on Isle of Wight, and half an hour of driving from Cowes to Yarmouth. All this time, I was afraid that Hornigold’s ship, the Royal Lion, wouldn’t be there, but it was. It really was there. Adam wasn’t surprised whereas I was blown away.

It seemed to be abandoned, which meant that the crew had disembarked and gone off to their respective homes. It was logical, considering that they’d just returned from their voyage from Lisbon and, apparently, unshipped everything illegal what had been on board in London. As I opened my door of the car, intending to head straight for the ship, Adam caught hold of my leather jacket’s sleeve.

“You’re not going there just like this, are you?”

“I am,” I stared at him in perplexity.

Shaking his head, he sighed. Still perplexed, I got out of the car and watched him round it on his side towards the boot. Having opened it when I joined him back there, Adam moved away the fake floor under which there was space big enough to accommodate two inconspicuous metallic cases. Inside one of them – the nearest to him and farthest from me – there were two guns and a few cartridge clips.

“I do hope that you didn’t fail a shooting text at the academy,” Adam took one of the guns and three clips and held it out to me.

“I didn’t have to,” I hid two clips in the pockets whereas the last one I put into a gun hilt. “It’s England, not Northern Ireland, after all. However, I do know how to shoot to kill.”

He glanced at me with a reasonable doubt while loading his gun, “Just don’t shoot me, please.”

After slamming the case and getting it to its spot, Adam closed the boot and we finally proceeded to the Royal Lion moored to the pierce in the middle of the harbour.

The ship was empty. We searched cabin by cabin, and there was nothing to find in any of them. Of course, it was a smuggler ship that had loads of hiding places, so we would never find them even if we spent a year or two turning it upside down. Still, I was sure that he was somewhere over here, I could practically sense him. On the day, I first came to smugglers upon my school graduation, nobody wanted to take me in except for the captain who participated in human trafficking by transporting immigrants from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom. I knew from experience how easy it would be to hide people on the ship pretending to be a catching trawler. The question was, though, where did Hornigold shove Adam’s son in? I was running over the possibilities in my mind when we heard steps.

By that time, we were back in the main passage to walk on the upper bridge, and somebody was climbing down the stairs to the hold. Adam immediately drew backwards to the cabin behind his back whereas I lurked in the cabin on the other side of the passage. As the steps levelled with us, Adam sprang out from his cover to knock a man down with a blow to his chest. Having darted out, I aimed the gun at the person lying on the floor. It was Hornigold himself who was quite taken off guard.

“Jim,” he croaked, “you’d better choose your friends more profoundly.”

Before I had a chance to remind him that I didn’t have any friends, Adam leaned all his weight upon him and put the gun against his forehead. “Where is my son?”

“No bloody clue!”

“I’m going to count to three.” By the sound of Adam’s voice, his answer enraged him, “when I’m done and you don’t tell me yet where I can find him, I’ll blow your brains out to the dogs.”

“Go ahead you double-dealing son of a bitch!” Hornigold yelled.

Not waiting for Adam to doom his son to die of starvation and thirst in a small, dark place by pulling the trigger, I seized him by the collar of his parka and dragged away from Hornigold.

“Cool the fuck off!” As I literally stood between them, Adam gave me a murderous look, but didn’t try to engage in a fight with me. I pushed him further away from Hornigold, “I’ll make him talk.”

Adam stepped back and lifted his arms as if saying, “Be my guest.”

I marched to Hornigold and put my hands on my hip, looking downward at him. “Sé lo que pensáis, Ben. Os matamos y vuestra tripulación nos dará caza para honrarte. No lo haremos porque soy un oficial de la ley y por lo tanto, no estoy autorizado a permitirle a mi amigo mataros, y porque tú los enviarás tras nosotros por atacaros dos veces. De un modo u otro, tendréis vuestra venganza, muerto o vivo. Para vuestra desgracia, hay mucho que es aun peor que la muerte misma. Mucho que no puede deshacerse o volver a lograrse incluso aunque haya sido vengado.” I squatted down by his side, “Fui capitán de un barco de contrabando por tres años, y conozco el sentimiento de estar al timón durante una tormenta o una cacería, la sensación del barco obedeciendo cada uno de vuestros movimientos como si los dos fueráis uno. No es posible olvidarlo. Lo extraño muchísimo. Sin embargo si decidiese cambiar de oficio un maravilloso día, todo lo que debería hacer sería volver a lo que dejé atrás. ¿Qué haríais si atravesara tus hombros de balas, y os impidiese así incluso tocar el timón con vuestras manos porque los cirujanos habrían amputado vuestros brazos para salvar vuestra vida?”* (look at End Notes for translation)

With these words, I poked my gun into his right shoulder, in that place where collarbone met humeral bone. I did hope that he knew me well enough not to question for a fleeting second my complete readiness to shoot every single bullet I had if he left me with no other choice.

“He’s in trawl store,“ Hornigold spit out with scorn, giving me to understand in that way that I could feel free to strike him off the list of my friends. “Look for the old barrel.”

Having slipped the gun under the belt on the small of my back, I got at my feet and went in the said direction.

The trawl store on any ship was dirty, but on this particular ship, it was especially dirty because there was a lot of rubbish here that allegedly could be caught in sea along with fish. Usually, captains made their crews clean it before sailing, not Hornigold who, as it’d just turned out, used it as a secret compartment. Very farsighted and wise of him. Seriously, who in his right mind would search through this boring shit if there were much better spots to hide contraband goods and people?

I found it in a far corner. The crumpled, rusty barrel covered with trawl that were too heavy to move aside even for me – an adult man in good physical form. Let alone a kid. When I at last threw it off the lid and opened the barrel, there he was, drawn himself together at the bottom of it, scared and frozen and surprisingly calm. He looked so much like Adam – the same features, the same straw hair, but his eyes were dark brown, of the Middle East origin, most likely, or something like it – that my heart was breaking. Damn you, Benjamin Hornigold… How fucking could you did this to a child?!

“Wes, I’m a police officer,” I introduced myself softly when the boy looked at me. “My name is James, and I’ll bring you back to your dad. Just, please, stand up so that I could grab you and pull out.”

At first, he hesitated. Who wouldn’t in his shoes? I patiently let him take his time.

A minute later, the boy rose. I leaned over the edge to stanch his small body and get him out. The plan was to put him on the floor and wrap in my leather jacket, but Wes clung onto me and I didn’t dare to try to tear him from myself. So, I rushed back to the main passage, holding him in my arms.

Adam’s face was the first thing I saw. I hadn’t been wrong to assume that this boy meant the world for him, more than anything could possibly mean. It was written all over it – relief and joy, love and anxiety, the need to press him to himself and never, ever let go of him. I handed Wes over to Adam when he approached us, not bothering to check up on Hornigold who was still lying on his back not far away from us to make sure he was still alive. For all I cared, after what he’d done to this boy, he could be dead or on the way to it. He had better be because if he wasn’t, one day I would kill myself.

“Give me the keys,” I held out my hand to Adam, “I’ll drive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Translation of the monologue in Spanish (by the courtesy of end-of-the-world-optimist on Tumblr):  
> “I know what you’re thinking, Ben. We kill you and your crew will hunt us down in your memory. We won’t because I’m a cop, and therefore, I’m not authorised to let my friend to kill you, and you will set them on us for assaulting you twice. In one way or another, you will have your revenge whether you’re dead or alive. Unluckily for you, there are things, which are much worse than death of itself. Things that can’t be undone or regained even if they’re avenged.”  
> “I was a captain of a smuggler ship for three years, and I know this feeling when you stand at the steering wheel during the storm or the pursuit and she follows every move you make as if you two constitute a whole. It’s unforgettable. I miss it badly. However, did I decide to change a job one fine day, all I would need to do is to go back to what I’ve left behind. What would you do if I put so many bullets in your shoulders that you would be stripped of this very possibility to touch the wheel with your hands ever again because doctors had to amputate your arms to save your life?”


	9. Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of Laverne Cox as Mary Reed's face claim belongs to ice-cream-and-noodles on Tumblr.

It was around midnight when Adam appeared in the kitchen where I was eating the dinner cooked by his mother. She warmed it up for us before going to bed. He looked worn-out, and I could imagine why – the last two days weren’t exactly uneventful or pleasant. One night of decent sleep would do him plenty of good, but I didn’t believe that he was going to get any sleep tonight.

“How is he?”

“Fell asleep, at last,” Adam proceeded to the sink to pour himself a glass of water. “I appreciate that you’ve settled the matter with the police instead of me, you know.” Having collected a plate with food Mrs Carter had left for him on the cupboard next to the cooker, he come to the kitchen table and put this all on it before sitting down opposite me, “What story did you feed to them, by the way?”

“Thieves broke into the wrong house,” I paused eating. “They took him along as insurance on the way out and abandoned subsequently in the woods near by Monk Walk in Gosport.”

He shortly nodded in reply, and we, both hungry as hunters, devoured our first meal in twenty-four hours if not longer without diverting our attention from the plates. Once my stomach was full, I recalled the question haunting me since I discovered that Adam had a son. Although he didn’t wear any ring, he could be married because during my visits to Section D, I never saw a person with a wedding ring as if it was forbidden by MI5 to wear them. So, I’d expected to meet her or hear of her – Adam’s wife or girlfriend. Yet she wasn’t in his parents’ house, and nobody had mentioned her this far.

“Where is his mother?”

“Fiona?” Adam glanced at me. “Around a year ago, my wife was shot by her first husband, a former Syrian high-ranking intelligence officer, in revenge upon me. I set him up to get her out of her native country because I fell in love with her while trying to turn him. She died in my arms.”

“I’m sorry.”

As much as I sympathized with him and Wes, at the same time, I was glad that his wife was out of the picture. I could lead my brother’s fiancée away without batting an eyelid, but I would never dare dissolve a marriage with a kid. Even if I lacked morality and conscience in a big way, I had principles.

“I killed Hornigold,” Adam said in his causal voice.

“If so, your family can’t stay here.” The thought of it wouldn’t leave me alone since I drove us from Yarmouth back to Titchfield, so I was glad to have voiced it finally.

“I’m going to call Harry in the morning.”

I shook my head, “I don’t think it’s a good idea. With all due respect to MI5, I highly doubt that your file as Chief of London Section D isn’t classified to that ‘eyes only’ degree, yet somebody has found out that you have a son and where your parents live, which tells me that this certain ‘somebody’ has access to MI5 databases. So, to whatever safe house Harry sends your folks, he, or she, will know.”

“And I doubt that any police safe house is a better option.”

“I didn’t say that we should rely on the police more than on MI5,” I finished eating and placed my fork onto the empty plate. “I would rather rely on myself than on one or another.”

Adam sighed. “I considered it. Sadly, those friends of mine whom I could trust with my family live outside of the UK, and I’m not sure that hiding Wes and my parents aboard is wise, either.”

“I have a friend here, in England, who could hide them.” I drummed on the table with my fingers meditatively before continuing, “She’s not affiliated with the police or MI5 or the army or the criminals or whomever else and can kill any man with bare hands if he pisses her off. I can give her a call right now and in the morning, she’ll come to Titchfiled to pick them up.” He pondered over my offer, so I decided to emphasize, “I do trust her, Adam, and I don’t trust anyone at all. They will be safe with her.”

“You can call from here,” he pointed at the phone hanging on the wall by the fridge.

On my way to the kitchen sink, I grabbed the receiver and dialled the number I knew by heart. Having pressed it to the left ear with my shoulder, I washed my plate while talking to my old friend.

“She’ll be here at 9,” I told Adam when the conversation was over. Done eating by that time, he brought his plate to the sink, too, and I moved aside so that he could wash it. I watched him for a while, not knowing how to put it best, until I chose to tell the truth. “You should get some sleep tonight.”

He snorted without any malice, “And where are you going to sleep? On my mother’s favourite sofa that reigns in the living room? It’s too short even for you. You like it or not, but there is only one bed suitable for an adult man in this house, and, as our guest, you’re going to occupy it.”

I could have protested. I could have persisted. On condition that I wanted to fall out with him all over again, and I didn’t. As it turned out to my great surprise, I had more than enough of it yesterday.

Having finished, Adam led me upstairs to the room whose window looked out on the garden. To be honest, after what he’d said, I expected to see the bed that barely could contain one adult at best, instead, there was this king-size bed, which could easily accommodate three adults at the very least.

“You know, there is plenty of room for us both in this bed,” I took my boots and leather jacket off at once. “So, you can well sleep here, with me, if you want. I don’t mind sharing it.”

Just like his son earlier today, he hesitated for a while. However, the alluring prospect of having a night of decent sleep seemed to have outweighed any other arguments because he dragged off his boots while rounding the bed and tumbled into it. When I turned off the lights and got between the sheets on my side of the bed, he already was sleeping like a dog. I dropped off to sleep in no time myself. After all, I didn’t have much sleep last night, I was tired to death, and my head was killing me.

The door flew open with crackle.

“Adam!”

Having woken up in half a moment, he sat up abruptly on the bed and rubbed his face, “Oh my God, mum, whatever happened, you could have knocked first.”

Following him, Wes peeped out from his comfortable nest between us. He had a bad dream that scared him, so he tiptoed into this room around two in the morning, and dozing Adam allowed him to stay with us without thinking twice. Not that I had anything against it, though. When Mrs Carter saw the boy, she backed up to the corridor immediately and I heard her shouting out, “Peter, dear, don’t call the police! I found him. He’s slept with Adam and James,” and her retreating measured steps.

There was nothing I wished more at this moment than to be swallowed up by the ground. Not only it was embarrassing and exposing but also paralysing and terrifying. I couldn’t move for the life of me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t relax and calm down. I was on the brink of having a panic attack.

Adam rumpled his son’s hair and kissed his head. “Are you okay?” Wes nodded energetically, and his father smiled. “Go tell grandma that she owes me pancakes for what she’s done just only.”

The boy climbed over me to the edge of the bed to jump off. After his bare feet landed on the floor, he ran into the corridor, intending to proceed in the same vein until he reached the kitchen.

“And close the door, please!”

As it slammed behind him, Adam fell down on his back and buried his face in his hands for a couple of seconds. Then he turned his head towards me, “Sorry.”

There must have been something in my eyes because he suddenly laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “Oh come on! It can’t be that your parents never caught you in bed with somebody.”

 If he only knew…

He lied side by side with me now. Just as his son did several minutes earlier. And here it was again, appeared from nowhere, - physical intimacy I’d been craving for. Adam hadn’t removed his hand, it was still leaned against my shoulder. Perhaps, I would never stop being amazed at how much this little could tell. Despite my chilly reaction to his attempted kiss, he still was attracted to me even if he tried his hardest not to act on it. I raised myself on my elbow to bend over him and kissed him, expecting him of him to react to it just like I had on the riverside. Instead of that, he kissed me back.

With his arm round my waist, Adam pulled me up to himself. In the next second, I was pinned down to the bed by his body, and he was quite heavy. I didn’t like this idea, so I wrapped my legs around his hips and rolled over. He didn’t like having me on himself as much as under him, and we turned over. It was when I finally realised that this was how it was going to be if at all. He would never let me call the shots, nor would I ever let him boss me around. Amusingly, it drove me wild. Both of us, actually, so long as we couldn’t stop kissing or tear ourselves away from each other for a fucking second.

“Adam!”

This time, there was knock at the door.

Adam lifted his head a little to listen attentively, “Yes?”

“There is some lady on the porch,” his father replied from the other side of the door, not trying to enter the room, fortunately. “She’s refused to come in, and she’s asking for James.”

“We’ll be right down there.”

I wanted to kiss him once again, yet I abstained from it. For the reason that if I did, we would walk downstairs in a couple of hours, not in five minutes. Did I keep Marry waiting outside that long, she wouldn’t forgive me. This woman knew her worth. So, I got up and was about to pick up my boots from the floor by the nightstand to put on when everything went dark before my eyes.

Having come round some time later, I found myself lying near the bed. The next thing what I saw was Adam who sat cross-legged on my left. Judging by his face expression, he was worried.

“James, you really need to check yourself into a hospital as soon as possible.”

“Give me your phone number,” I sat up and moved my boots to myself, “and I will.”

At first, his eyebrows arched upwards in surprise because this was, obviously, the last thing on his mind right now, and then Adam shook his head, laughing. “Not until you’re in hospital.”

At least, he hadn’t said ‘no’, which I was going to regard as a good omen. As I got shod, I slowly stood up with Adam right by my side who was ready to grasp me in case I fainted again. Thankfully, it didn’t happen. By the moment, I walked downstairs and out of the house, respectively, I felt better, not as dizzy as before, although my head had been splitting like hell since yesterday.

“Jim the ginger!” A very tall, blond-haired, dark-eyed, light-brown-skinned woman in leather trousers, a silk blouse and expensive high-heeled shoes met me with open arms. “Let me kiss you.”

“Last time you kissed me, it didn’t end well.”

“You and I, we remember that time very differently.” She grinned, squeezing me like a bear. I was almost out of breath when she recoiled. For such a lady, she was a very strong woman. “So?”

“Come,” I waved towards the Carters’ house, “I’ll introduce you.”

I didn’t ask her why she hadn’t gone in on the invitation of Peter Carter who must have answered the door. She never did it unless she was accompanied by somebody she knew, and besides, she disliked men making room for her. That was why I led all the way to the kitchen where the Carters – Adam, his parents, and Wes – had already gathered to have breakfast together.

"Mary Reed,” I announced, stepping in first.

In fact, I’d been used to dubious glances any crowd of law-abiding citizens cast on her since that time when by day, she was Mark Reed, a SAS officer serving at HM Naval Base Portsmouth, and Sophia Bianco, a drag queen singing in gay clubs, at night. It had been eight years since her full transition from male to female, and looking at her, nobody would now guess that she wasn’t born a woman. Before that, she often was maltreated, so I was uneasy. Nevertheless, the Carters surprised me: they welcomed her warmly, and during the breakfast, she won their hearts. Why not? Mary was intelligent, humorous, keen on British politics, economic and social problems. Additionally, in contrast with me who remained silent all this time, she knew how to behave appropriately in company and keep the conversation up.

Jealousy. That was what I felt watching her interact with Adam’s folks. I was jealous of her. I hated this feeling making me wish I’d been half as good at connecting with people as she’d always been so that I could get along with them just as soon as she did because I’d love to be a part of this family. And in my life, I’d never wanted to be a part of any family, nor had I ever wanted to have my own.

After we finished the breakfast, Adam helped his son to change while his father and I put the Carters’ suitcases in the boot of Reed’s silver Land Rover Freelander parked by the pavement in front of the house. Mr and Mrs Carter were checking for the second time whether they had locked up all the doors and windows when Mary approached me waiting for Adam by his working black Lexus RX 350.

“He’s a good guy,” she stated, gazing together with me at Adam saying goodbye near her car to Wes whom he held in his arms. “And he has a family. You can’t do to him what you usually do.”

“Buzz the fuck off, Mary,” I cut short, too angry with her to be polite.

She grinned ironically, “This time, you’ve got it so bad, Jim, that either it’ll kill you or the world will finally get to see the real James McGraw.” She raked to me to add, “I will love you anyway.”

In the meanwhile, the Carters got into Land Rover and Adam himself seated Wes on the back seat, so Mary had to leave me alone and take the wheel. She drove off first, Adam and I trailed her in his car from Tichfield to M27 and along it towards Portsmouth. Once we had passed Portsmouth, we were to part ways: Mary would proceed farther by A27 and we would turn to A3 to go back to London.

My headache became excruciating almost right away. Familiar landscapes flying by didn’t help me to distance from it. Quite the opposite, they only made me feel worse. As well as Mary’s “you can’t do to him what you usually do” ringing in my ears. Usually, I had sex for a few weeks on the expiry of which I got bored and moved on, not looking back, because with time, all the affairs I’d ever had typically started developing into something serious whereas I didn’t need anything serious.

To tell the truth, I’d never had anything serious. I’d been married to Miranda for ten years, yet on the inside, it still was an affair in the disguise of a marriage since we’d been leading the separate lives, rarely intersecting outside of our bedroom. Even the house we lived in, it was all hers, and why wouldn’t it be? Considering that she’d chosen and decorated it while I hadn’t done a stitch of work, except for singing the papers. She’d also arranged our wedding, I’d only attended it. She planned our holidays, she paid our bills, she bought our food, and I didn’t do anything. I just hung about.

When I saw Portsmouth from afar – glorious and beautiful, the old seaside town that embodied that bottom of my life I hit more than ten years ago, right on the eve of my first meeting with Miranda, it suddenly came home to me that I’d clutched at her as my anchor not to drown for good and all.

In the light of it, I tried to imagine a few weeks of having Adam in every sense of his word. It was difficult because I didn’t know much of him; however, I wanted to fall asleep and wake up in the same bed with him. I wanted to share a house that would be ours with him. I wanted to help him raise Wes. I wanted to be the part of his life. I wanted to spend the rest of my live with him. Then, I tried to picture myself walking away from him and back to my wife and my truly pointless life. Even thinking of it – that I would have to break up with Adam and forget about him – hurt so badly that it decided everything.

I turned to say to him, “Take me to the hospital.”

Having shot an awfully surprised glance at me, Adam, nevertheless, didn’t comment on what I’d just asked him to do in any way. In mutual silence, we made it to London where he brought me straight to St Thomas’ Hospital in Westminster located across the River Thames from the MI5 headquarter. He parked the car a few steps away from its main entrance and stalled the engine prior to dragging a folded sheet of paper out of his parka’s breast pocket. I could bet that his number was scribbled down on it.

 I couldn’t help smiling. Yet I did my best to supress this smile, “So you can keep your word.”

“As long as you keep yours.”

I snatched the note out of his fingers, “Watch me!”

I got out of the car and proceeded to the hospital doors. Before going through them, I looked back and found Adam where I’d left him. He was following me with his eyes. It was when it hit me.

God damn it, James, how did you manage to fall head over heels in love with him?


	10. Paris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to my friend astrangegirlsmind because she's my personal bookworm and to my other friend delahov because Max is for her in this story.

The high-speed Eurostar train I was on had just left the Chunnel on the French side of the English Channel when my phone vibrated in my pocket of my jacket, indicating in this way that I’d received a text message. Not expecting to see anything interesting since the only person who could text me was my son and I forbade him do it for the time being, I took it out to look at its screen.

_Brain concussion. Just so you know._

James McGraw. I smiled. First of all, I was relieved to learn that he hadn’t escaped from hospital yet and was going to be taken care of as long as necessary. Secondly, I had some notion about how difficult it must have been for him to be admitted of his own free will to the place he feared, not to mention the fact that prior to it, he had to acknowledge that there was something wrong with him, which, as I suspected, was even more difficult because he never complained. And he never asked for anything: when he could have asked me to drop speed, he preferred to yell at me; when he could have asked me for my phone number, he preferred to exchange it. As if it somehow he wasn’t allowed to show weakness, and anything could pass for weakness except for anger or indifference.

It made me wonder repeatedly, “What had happened to him?” There should be at least one valid reason why he was able to tolerate pain better than a vast majority of intelligence officers I’d ever known or why he talked back when I asked questions. Whereas, if I shut up – exactly as I’d done in the garden of my parent’s house – and listened without interrupting him, he opened up, and for some time, I caught glimpses of a fiercely loyal, determined, balanced, and surprisingly nice person. Maybe, he wasn’t extremely pleasant to deal with due to his perpetual swings – which could predicted in no way – from dead emotional calm to extreme irritability and back; however, I liked this feeling I tended to have while he was around. Somehow, I felt safe and comfortable. Somehow, instead of turning my life upside down as any foreign object would do, he integrated in it as if he’d always been a part of it, so efficiently that I ceased to recall those days when I was completely unaware of his existence. And I missed him.

I would like to go to hospital to check up on him. Every day. That was why I’d driven him to St Thomas Hospital regardless of its storytelling name. Provided that I practically lived at work, it would have been easy for me to make time for short runs onto the opposite bank of the River Thames than to any other place in London. Unfortunately, it happened so that one of the members of the Walrus crew scattered in Eastern England after the attack on the Brazilian embassy had been captured during the last police raid, and Dimitri managed to get him to talk. In the wake of the information, which had been obtained from him and reports from Jo who had succeeded in her mission, Harry decided to send me to Paris. In his view, I, thanks to my professional background, was less likely to screw up than Ros.

_I won’t be visiting, sorry. Not in town._

Generally, I loved my job, and I’d never regretted joining the British intelligence. Still, there had always been moments when two events concurred and I had to choose one over another or when I did want to be able to explain my absence properly without thinking twice of what I was about to say.

_I’m banned from having visitors anyway._

I was both astonished at his crude attempt to shift the blame from me as if it wasn’t a big deal that after he set my problems above everything else, including his own wellbeing, I couldn’t return the favour and shocked by it. Not that I didn’t know that he cared about me, it was obvious. I had no idea that he didn’t care about himself this much. As if he didn’t deserve anything at all.

_I’ll call you when I’m back._

He didn’t reply. I couldn’t help sensing even at this distance that he was as hurt by my sudden departure from London as I had been by his shocked reaction to my attempted kiss. Nevertheless, in contrast with me, he didn’t try venting it on me. No matter how you look at it, he was a better man than me, and I kept getting added evidence of that, accompanied by my sincere respect and admiration.

An hour later, when I arrived in Paris, I was still thinking of James. To tell the truth, I thought of him almost non-stop, and with time, it became harder and harder to force him out of my head.

Ros in a white trench coat met me at the Eurostar platform of Gare Du Nord.

“How is Wes?”

For a bunch of people who kept secrets for a living, we knew too much about each other. At times, I doubted that something could be concealed from our team. The next thought crossed my mind I disliked: I wasn’t sure whether she had been informed by Ruth of James’ involvement and, all of a sudden, I didn’t want her or anybody else to be well up on my relationship with DI McGraw.

“He’s fine, thank you.”

Having said this to her, I realised that I hadn’t thanked James for his help in getting my son back or providing temporary shelter to my entire family in his friend’s house. I’d taken it for granted, and for this, I was ashamed deeply. Of course, in my defence, it could be told that I’d been preoccupied with Wes’ abduction, but it didn’t excuse me because he’d got around to thanking me for saving his life.

Walking fast side by side with me towards the exit, Ros asked, “Are you still going to get engaged with her directly although I told Harry that it’s a bad idea?”

“It’s not that we have a choice,” I replied absent-mindedly, struggling to get James McGraw off my mind. “Besides, if what we were told is true, we also don’t have any time left. But if it makes you feel better about this entire doubtful epopee, I’m going to form my own independent opinion on her before making any move so that we won’t get into a mess again for if we do, Whitehall will eat us alive.”

It wasn’t a piece of cake, though. All we knew of Max was that she, nee Maxine Elhabda, was born in Calgary, by a white French-Canadian mother from a black Jamaican father. She spent her childhood in the Bahamas where her father’s relatives lived and moved to the UK at the age of eighteen to study Accountancy and Financial Management at University of Portsmouth. She never graduated owing to disappearing right in the middle of her fourth year. Later on, she showed up under the name of Max Silver in Mexico. Ever since, she’d been linked to the Walrus crew by every intelligence agency.

In real life, she appeared to be a whole lot more exotically beautiful than on surveillance footage due to her mixed heritage and natural charm and didn’t seem to be that kind of a person who would enjoy studying her ass off. Having shadowed her for two straight days, I discovered that she liked shopping for clothes and, especially, for shoes of high quality as well as that she would rather spend time with her personal assistant – a thin black girl – than with her husband. Besides, she constantly checked out women passing by her in the streets or stores, which only proved what that member of the Walrus crew had said about her. Even if she might haven’t been having an affair with Anne Bonny, she still was gay. Therefore, in my future approach, I wouldn’t be able to rely on my handsomeness, which I ordinarily resort to when it came to women, so for two days and all this shiny morning, I’d been breaking my head over how to get on her right side and kept failing to think up anything suitable.

After lunch, she dropped in at the antique bookstore. It puzzled me. Yes, our source asserted that she was obsessed with bookstores, libraries, ancient maps, and naval history although that didn’t make any sense to him. Nor did it to me because I hardly could believe that she liked to read because for years, she’d been seen to be reading nothing but fashion magazines. What this woman was up to?

Following her, I entered it and hid behind bookshelves to remain unnoticed. I stole up to Max as close as possible to hear her speaking to an elderly man in glasses. In French, which I didn’t understand.

I pressed the button on my earphone and hissed, “Ros?”

“They’re talking about the book she’s asked him to search out for her,” Ros’ dry voice resounded in my ear. “The first edition of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. He found it, and its current holder agreed to sell it, but it’s not going to be a cheap deal. She says that she’ll pay any money.”

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson? James had mentioned it once. When the asset who had tipped us off about the attack was killed and he brought the autopsy report and crime scene pictures to our last meeting before my undercover operation went to rack and ruin. Then I’d ignored it as an irrelevant detail, but when the same book surfaced in the same case for the second time?!

Their conversation ended so abruptly that I barely had time to whisk in between two shelves to protect myself from being spotted. Since, in addition to that, she walked in my direction, I pretended to be skimming over the titles on the backs of the books in front of me. And suddenly, there it was. Among them. The Spanish edition of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

_Thomas wasn’t pleased when somebody interrupted his debate with Lieutenant McGraw by knocking at the door of his office. Yet he raised his voice a little to say, “Yes?”_

_McGraw stood up as his beautiful wife – Lady Miranda Hamilton – slipped in. “Came to make sure you two were still alive. No one’s heard from you in hours.”_

_She came up to Thomas and put her hands on his shoulders. Unconsciously, he caught one of them – soft and perfectly white – to rub his cheek against it as another subtle sign of his love to her. “The lieutenant was just recounting to me his belief that the only thing that stands between us and a prosperous Nassau is an ocean, 100 years of history, and human nature.”_

_“Has he been like this all day?” With a sly smile, Miranda asked James who just sat down._

_McGraw clearly wasn’t comfortable to be in the same room with both of them because he didn’t understand how a husband could be so hopelessly kind to his wife’s lover. Little he knew of their marriage… Little he knew of Lord Thomas Hamilton’s true nature…_

_“More or less, ma’am, yes.”_

_Miranda gracefully waltzed to the shelves and took one of the book. “A gift. One of my favourites.” A second later, she placed in on the table before the lieutenant with her best_ _flirtatious smile. “And you might find it helpful in dealing with my husband going forward.”_

_Thomas recognised its cover made of red leather and decorated with gold ornament at first try. “Thank you, dear. Well played. Although that edition is in Spanish. I don’t think the lieutenant speaks it.”_

_His wife smiled at him before smiling at McGraw whom she was fond of too much for their mutual sake. “Perhaps, he should learn. In his profession, you never know when it might be useful.”_

And in this lifetime, he had learnt it.

It suddenly struck me that James’ birthday was only two weeks away, and this book, which was similar to that one from the recollection, would be a perfect present. I got it out and overturned to look at the price tag. Yes, it would surely be if I weren’t a single father working for the British government who couldn’t afford buying it without ruining himself. With regret, I put it back on the shelf.

“Do you speak Spanish?” Max stood in the aisle, blocking the only exit with her curvy body.

“No, I don’t,” I shook my head and went on playing along, “But one of my friends does, so I thought it would be great to give him something old in Spanish. If it weren’t so expensive!”

“Come on,” she reached out for the book and pull it out, “I’ll buy it for you.”

I raised my eyebrows, “Just like that? You don’t even know me.”

She grinned, “Oh, I feel like I do! After all, you’ve been stalking me for almost three days.”

Thus, she’d made me. Not that it was impossible in principle; it simply was difficult enough for somebody who had no clue about how surveillance and counter-surveillance worked. She, apparently, did, and more than some idea, if she spotted me because I was great at blending into any background.

“Well,” I spread my arms, “I don’t speak French, and I didn’t know that you speak English.”

“Is this your usual pick-up line or you just made it up?”

I laughed, “I’m not flirting with you. It would be pointless, wouldn’t it?

She frowned as if her sexual orientation was the secret that could destroy her physically or deprive her of all she had. The secret her friends couldn’t know, only enemies. “Who do you work for?”

“Does it matter?”

“You’re not a criminal,” Max twiddled with the book, “because you can’t afford this. Then, what it is? CIA? French Intelligence? Interpol? UNO? The Financial Intelligence Unit of World Bank?”

“Why it’s so important?”

Max didn’t have time to answer because the owner of the bookshop materialized behind her back and addressed to her in French. As she stepped aside, he stared at me with expectation. I left this nook to run into Max distracted by an elderly pair who tried to inquire about something.

I availed myself of the opportunity to sneak off. At long last, I dropped enough hints for her to figure out all she needed to know of me. It wasn’t the best of my plans, but considering that I’d had to invent it on the spur of the moment, it wasn’t the worst of it, either. Now before getting down to business with her, I had to wait until she swallowed a bait. If at all. This might well happen, too.

The rest of the week elapsed without incidents: Max loitered her time away in stores and cafés as usual with our agents on her heels while I did my routine work stuff at Paris MI6 station. On Friday, she returned to that bookstore and came out with a big paper bag. Several hours after it, Ros popped in the room where upon my arrival in the French capital, I’d occupied a desk without permission of the local Station Chief and put a middle-sized package onto it. A small card was attached to it.

“To a tall blondie with a posh accent?” I stared at Ros questioningly.

“Max gave it to that MI6 officer who was trailing her today,” she explained. “She specifically chose him over his French partner, so I can’t imagine what other blondie she could be referring to.”

As I tore the wrappings, I saw the familiar cover. Unwittingly, I smiled. She’d bought that book for me all the same. There was a note written by the same hand and hidden between the first and second pages. “ _Place du Pantheon, 10am, tonight. In the centre of the three-cornered square_.”

I showed it to Ros, “Looks like we’re in.”

“It could be a trap.”

“It’s always a trap,” I shrugged. “Nevertheless, I’m sure as hell curious as to what the woman who is bored enough to look around attentively while wandering about the most romantic city alone has to say to me. If at first, she risked cornering me in a bookstore to confront face-to-face, and on the day she got hold of the book she had promised to pay any price for, she sent me a very expensive gift.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, Ros, I’ll have to do it by myself.”

At appointed time, she gave a lift to Rue des Fosses Saint-Jacques from which Le Pantheon was only a stone's throw away. As I reached the square, I noticed Max in a dark red woollen coat that set off her dark brown hair, light golden skin, and light brown eyes beautifully standing in the centre of it. She was unaccompanied by her usual trails. I insisted on it because I didn’t want anyone to know what we would be discussing. They disappeared when I showed up and were to return once I was gone.

“Mr MI6.” Max smiled when I stopped in front of her.

“Mrs Silver,” I stuck icy hands in pockets. For European spring, it was way too cold in Paris this night. “What should I do for you in exchange for the masterpiece by Cervantes?”

“Oh, keep it!” She laughed. “It’s done its part.”

“How very generous of you.”

“Not my money,” she shrugged in a carefree fashion and peered into my face. “This is what you after, isn’t this? The head of my husband on a platter as silver as his surname. You all want it.”

“Is it an offer?”

Max didn’t respond straight away, though. For a few minutes, she hesitated as if deciding on something. “My road to the United Kingdom is closed. Open it, and I’ll deliver Long John Silver to you.”

I wasn’t surprised. Our source told us that she by all means wanted to get to London, so I was authorised by Harry to play this card if necessary. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“So I thought,” she dipped her hand into her elegant handbag of dark blue colour and fished out a tiny flash drive. “Goodwill gesture,” she said, holding it out to me. “I’ll give you the second one while I’m in London, and the third one right before I hop a plane departing from it. All three, combined together, will help you to take him along with the entire Walrus crew down for good.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I collected it from her hand and hid in my pocket.


	11. Answers

I texted to James that I was on my way back to the United Kingdom as soon as I got on a Eurostar train, but there was no reply. I’d done my research on brain concussion while I was waiting for Max to swallow the bait. Thus, I knew that dark, quiet room, bed rest, hours of decent sleep, no external irritants in the form of visitors, watching TV, reading, listening to anything, speaking on the phone or surfing on the Internet were the most effective treatment for his condition. So, I decided that he must have been sleeping and would answer when he woke up or I would see how he was doing with my own eyes because I planned to go to St Thomas hospital right from St Pancras International.

However, shortly after my train left the Chunnel on the British side of the English Channel, Harry called me to say that I would need to debrief him in person about Max Silver’s demand prior to his meeting with Home Secretary in Whitehall. And, of course, national security always came first.

Upon my arrival to London, there still was no reply from James. Having caught a cab to be driven to the Thames House, I texted to him again, stating that I was back in town. He didn’t respond straight away, and I started to worry. I didn’t know whether he was just mad at me or something happened. There were loads of possibilities: I went over all of them, and none seemed to sit right with me, which made me want to be able to drop out of this rat race called my job and go look for him. Worse of all in this situation was that in the Grid, I had to put my BlackBerry on my desk before shutting myself and Harry up in the conference room so that our top-secret conversation wouldn’t be interrupted.

A couple of hours after that, I returned to my desk to check my phone for text messages and calls, and no, I hadn’t received anything from him so far. I tried again by sending “ _James?_ ” to his number; then Ruth drew my attention away with forms I needed to fill in for our accounting department. The next time I looked at my phone, it turned out that I’d finally got something from him.

_Temple Pier, Victoria Embankment._

“Ruth, I’m going home,” I grabbed the car keys, which I stored on the top of my desk, under my computer monitor, in order not to lose them at every opportunity. “Call me if you need anything.”

“Everything is okay?”

“I don’t know yet,” I looked at my phone in the hope that he might elaborate on what the hell he was doing over there. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t. Damn it, James.

Struggling into my black parka, I stormed out of Section D and took the express lift down to the underground garage where we kept our cars. When I drove out, it was pouring down as though from a pail outside with no sigh that it was about to stop in the offing. So twenty minutes later, as I parked my car on Temple Pl, I was forced to roll up my jeans and get an umbrella from under the front seat.

I found him sitting on the old stone stairs leading to water. Judging by how sopping wet his hair and clothes looked, he’d been here for quite a while. Judging by his vacant look, the way he stared at the River Thames in front of him, hadn’t he been afraid of water, he would gladly have let it engulf him long ago. I walked down and squatted on his left, a step away to give him some space just in case.

“I thought you were in hospital.”

McGraw slightly turned his head in my direction, giving me to understand in that way that he’d noticed my appearance. “I was discharged this morning. The latest test results were good, and they decided that a week at home would help me recover in full much faster than yet another week in their company. That would be true if my wife didn’t call my father while I was locked up in my hospital room because I act strangely. A week ago, she herself wanted me to be taken to hospital, and when I actually went there, she thinks that I act strangely. Yes, I hate hospitals, but I’m also capable of recognising that I have brain concussion and need help. However, no, James would never do that of his own free will; therefore, there is something wrong with him if he did, and if so, I must call his father. And, of course, my father flew to London immediately. His son can’t act strangely. His son can’t put him in a bad light. His son can’t be a cop. He can’t do the only job in the world that makes him feel like he really does something worth doing because his father despises it. His son can’t get injured on duty and check himself into a hospital to be patched up. It’s inappropriate. Whatever I’ve done in my life, it’s always inappropriate. That’s why I need to be straightened out by my father who always knows what’s better for me. The exact same father who calls me ‘Jimmy’ when he aims at reprimanding or humiliating me.”

James paused to gather his breath. “What he would have liked to do is lock me away in asylum for good. He did it once. The official version of events was PTSD caused by break-in during which I, a sixteen-years-old boy, shot dead a thief. In reality, he caught me with a son of one of our servants. Naked, having sex, almost there. He knew we would be upstairs, so he brought along one of his double-barrelled guns and fucking shot him cold-bloodedly. Right in my bed. There were still scraps of his flesh and blood all over me and my face when they took me to that mental shithole. I was released a month later, though. The psychiatrist who had observed me told my father that in his professional opinion, I’m not crazy, just stressed out – why wouldn’t I be? After years of looking over my shoulder? - and he’d better accept me the way I am because it can’t be fixed or cured. He never did. He just treats me like I’m some freak of nature – a fucking piece of work as he likes to refer to me talking about me to somebody in my presence – and demands that I’ll start a family at last. All the more so I’m married. He doesn’t give a fuck that I don’t want to have children so long as I hate this very thought of this monster being their grandfather, and I dread to imagine what I will do if one of them happens to be his carbon copy.”

“I simply fail to understand,” his voice cracked, “why it’s so hard to leave me alone? I fled from Scotland to be as far from him as possible. I got married so that he stopped spying on me. What else do I have to do? To commit suicide since he can’t accept that I love men? And I fucking love you?”

I went speechless. I didn’t know what to say not only because he’d openly declared his feelings to me just now but also because I was knocked out by what he’d revealed. I’d heard many grim stories. I’d seen many horrible things. But this story, these things…. I was beside myself with rage and felt as helpless as never before in my life. Even when Fiona was dying in my arms. Even when my son got abducted. On the other part, I, at any rate, knew what to do, so I rose to my feet.

“Come on,” I stepped to him with the outstretched hand, “it’s getting late and cold. Trust me on this, you do not want to catch pneumonia.”

James stood up on his own, avoiding looking me in the face. Yes, here we went again. It was disgustingly insufferable, but what could I do about it? He didn’t cast a single glance at me, walking side by side with me. As we reached my car, he got inside and curled up in the front seat. I turned on air conditioner to keep him warm: since I resided in Barnet, it wasn’t exactly a short ride from Victoria Embankment to my house with or without traffic congestion. Concentrated, I was manoeuvring in the streets and stopping at the red light every so often whereas he seemed to be reflecting upon something.

“You parents hate me, don’t they?” McGraw inquired out of the blue.

I grinned, “As a matter of fact, they were displeased with me. Mum in particular. That morning, as soon as I appeared in the kitchen, she was all like, “Oh my God, Adam! He’s married!” My mother in a nutshell. She doesn’t care who sleeps with me: when I was in high school and my then-girlfriend stayed overnight, mum would fetch breakfast in my bedroom because she couldn’t stand letting us go to school without it. But perish the thought if her son sleeps with somebody who’s in a relationship. Let alone married. Sometimes I really wonder what she would say to me if she knew that I’d led Fiona away.”

“So you had relationship with men?”

I clicked my tongue, “That’s tricky. Personally, I would claim that I’m straight because in my private life, I’ve always dated women; however, in my line of work, such a thing as sexual orientation doesn’t exist. You sleep with whom you had to for the sake of the case you work on, so I did have affairs with men. Some of them I even liked. Hell if I know what it calls, though. Situational bisexuality?”

He didn’t respond and remained quiet for the rest of the way. When I parked the car in my street, he got out to freeze on the pavement since he had no idea which house was mine. Having brought the umbrella and my holdall along, I hopped off in the rain and passed by him towards a grey-plastered two-storey building crammed in between two other buildings of the same size and of different colours. As usual, there was a pile of correspondence on the floor right behind the door, which I moved aside with my foot carefully before entering the house and turning on the lights in the hall.

I made him take his boots off to see him to the bathroom where I provided him with towels, my own tracksuit trousers, T-shirt, and a pair of socks. While he was having a hot shower, I bustled about the house. By the time, he showed up in the kitchen with his wet clothes in hands, which I shoved in the washing machine straight away, takeaway food I’d ordered was delivered. As he sat down at the table, I slipped a rug I’d found in the living room on his shoulders and handed a big cup of tea over to him.

He looked devastated, lost, depressed, and kept his eyes cast down. I wanted to say something meaningful that would cheer him up or make him feel less awkward, but nothing came to mind, so we ate in silence until my phone, which was lying on the table at my right all along, rang up.

It was Sir Harry Pearce.

“How did it go?”

“He gave us twelve hours.” Harry sounded indescribably pissed off. Seemingly, his meeting with Home Secretary had been unpleasant beyond measure. “Not a minute more.”

“That’s not much, but I think it will do it,” I lowered my head, ribbing my eyes. “Couldn’t you call Ros to inform her? I’m not in the Grid due to family emergency.”

“Adam…” Now he was cross with me.

“I’ll be back in the morning.”

“You’d better be.” And he hung up.

I threw the phone back onto the table to bury my face in my hands. This day simply couldn’t get any worse. When I straightened up, I discovered that James was gazing at me with a mute question he didn’t resolved to ask. By his face, it was obvious that he didn’t want me to get in any trouble because of him although it was bit too late for that. Harry was going to give me a sound bashing for disappearing in the middle of the supremely important operation. Provided that we wouldn’t mess up tomorrow. If we would, I was likely to be suspended and investigated along with my entire team because we literally had been lying down on the job recently, which was inadmissible by default. Was that our fault or not.

Moreover, I didn’t have the slightest clue how I would be able to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds tomorrow. Nevertheless, I must make it work, and at the same time, I categorically didn’t want to leave James in his current state of mind alone for a second. It was when it hit me.

“I’m going to be shadowing somebody tomorrow while coordinating another operation,” I said to him. “For twelve hours – more or less so – and I could really use a second pair of eyes.”

“A cop and an intelligence officer tailing a suspect together?” He snorted sceptically.

Somehow, it recurred me back in time to the conversation Thomas Hamilton once had with his James McGraw. He was such a sceptic, too. Until he was infected with passion, enthusiasm, idealism, altruism, and this inner understanding that he was doing the right things. The things that mattered.

_Reciting the biblical narrative of the creation of the world, Thomas stood by the window of his office. Having finished, he turned round to address to Lieutenant McGraw directly, “And the moral of the story – everybody needs a partner. I’m not looking for someone to hold my hand. I need someone who can help me ensure that Nassau survives. The stakes are too great for anything else.”_

_James was amused and confused, but he would never let him see the latter. “And you suspect that I’m that person despite the fact that it’s clear that we both view the world very differently?”_

_“Because of it!” Thomas liked his uneducated doubts of the man who’d seen more of the world than he would ever do. “Strange pairs, Lieutenant, they can achieve the most unexpected things.”_

I couldn’t refrain from getting this – the best argument against his scepticism – in edgeways. That, and I was curious whether he remembered it or not. Whether he remembered anything else except for what made him feel ashamed and risk his life for me again and again.

“Strange pairs, Detective Inspector, they can achiever the most unexpected things.”

His reaction was similar to how he’d reacted when I kissed him on the riverbank. Total shock and full stupor. Fortunately, taught by bitter experience over which I’d had enough time to ponder properly and draw conclusions from during my stay in Paris, I didn’t try to rush anything for this once as I’d done back then. I just let him take his time and patiently waited for him to collect himself.

“You remember…” It escaped his lips with his breath at last.

I nodded, “Every single detail.”

“So, I was right?” He was overtly upset. “You drink so much coffee not to dream of it?”

“I don’t know what it was like for you, James, but for me…” I started speaking with my hands as I always did when I got emotional over something, “Imagine that room I was held in. Your body in a straightjacket sits motionless in the centre of it, and you stand by the wall. You have no control of your physical shell, you’re out of it, and you can’t get back. Then for some ridiculous reason, you turn round, and there is this world behind you – enormous, colourful, horribly realistic – where you wear shoes and silk stockings, wigs and a seal ring. You live in London, but it’s some different London, full of horses and carriages instead of bicycles and cars. You’re married to a woman you’ve never met in your real life and in love with the man you’ve met prior to the attack on the embassy. And you’re drowning in it.

“Mercifully, it stopped once the drugs were out of my system, and with time, his recollections became… recollections. Physically, I’m fine: a monstrous hangover, two days of hellish headache, good test results. As I was told, I got off light. People with brain concussion mustn’t be given or heavily overdosed on any antipsychotic drugs because it can damage a brain for good. Psychologically? Every time I close my eyes, I find myself in Bethlem Royal Hospital – not that modern one I’d been in, the old one where he’d been – and I re-live all over again every single thing that had been done to him there. The only way not to return there is not to sleep. Or sleep with you by my side. I don’t know why, but I didn’t dream of that damned place when we and my son shared the bed in my parents’ house.”

This hurricane of emotions in his eyes was what I’d experienced listening to him telling his story on Temple Pier. Sympathy, pain, despair, helplessness, anger, an urge to protect at any cost, and love, they all intertwined and longed to be expressed. He just didn’t know how to do it. So hadn’t I.

“Well, I guess, I got lucky: at least, I don’t question my sanity anymore although I used to. Not since I met your wife who looks exactly like his wife. Still, it’s like there are two men co-habituating in my body – me, Adam Carter, and he, Lord Thomas Hamilton. Sometimes, I can tell myself from him; sometimes, I can’t. Sometimes, I know what I feel; sometimes, I don’t. Especially when it comes to you. It’s…” I shook my head, “It’s exhausting. Especially because I don’t know how much you remember.”

“It’s just glimpses and nightmares,” James spoke in a low, flat voice, “But I do remember you. What happened to you. What your father did to you. And why.”

Suddenly, all the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle were put together, and everything became clear as day for me. “The story is repeating itself, isn’t it?” I asked rhetorically. “With the difference that this time, we changed places: I have parents who love me, and you have a father who disregards you.”

“You deserve it.”

“I can’t say that you deserve it.”

He screwed up his face, “I left you in Bedlam and fled from London with Miranda.”

“In that lifetime, yes,” I couldn’t wave it away, no matter how badly I wanted, “but in this one, you got me out of it and even if we’re sort of quits because later, I saved your life, you found my son. If this doesn’t expiate abandoning Thomas to his fate, then I fail to conceive what possibly can.”

Having begun talking, I unexpectedly ran into the right words. The words I should have said to him on Temple Pier, they came from Thomas. “James, you have to stop using your father to punish yourself. You have to forgive yourself. For the reason that although your father has gone out of his way and far beyond that to break you down, you’re not broken. You don’t need to be fixed or destroyed just because you, your choices, your beliefs, your way of living or your sexual orientation get on his nerves. This is your life, and yours only. You own it, and in it, you can do whatever you please.”

For a while, he stared at me, processing what he’d heard. I watched the meaning behind these words, the feelings hidden between them sink in. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

I pointed at his left hand, “You’re married.”

He glanced at his wedding ring as if he’d long forgotten about its existence and would have never remembered if I didn’t remind him. In the next second, he took it off without any hesitation and dropped into his empty cup. Following that, he directed his eyes back to me, “Is it better this way?”

I couldn’t help smiling.


	12. Max

I was woken up by my ringing and vibrating phone. It just wouldn’t stop. Swearing to myself, I leaned out of the bed to pick up a pair of blue jeans from the floor. Thank God, James didn’t toss them to the corner or anywhere else yesterday. In that case, I would have to get up, and I didn’t want to get up. Having fished the phone out of its pocket, I dropped my jeans and fell back on my pillow.

“Yes?”

“Are you sleeping?” There was a faint note of hidden disapproval in Ros’ voice.

“We all sleep sometimes.” I closed my eyes and screened them with my hand. “Why?”

“Max Silver is an early bird, as it turned out,” she answered dryly, staying within the bounds of professionalism despite her wish to tell me what she thought of my behaviour. “She’s on the Eurostar train to London, which is to depart in ten minutes. So long as I’d been unable to get hold of you for the last ten hours, I had to ask Dimitri to meet her at St Pancras. You owe him coffee for covering your ass.”

I bended my every effort to pay as little heed to the mention of my ass as possible. For the reason that it made me recall what it and the rest of my body experienced last night thanks to James McGraw, and if I kept recalling that in detail, I wouldn’t manage to concentrate on anything else.

“I’ll catch him on the way,” I rubbed my eyes. “And call you back right after that.”

“I hope so.”

As soon as our chat was over, I looked at the phone screen. It was half past five in the morning, which meant that even if we walked upstairs around ten in the evening, I slept for five hours at best. Nearly not enough to be fully functional after forty-eight hours of wakefulness, litres of coffee, and the wildest sex I’d ever had in my life. Barely refraining from groaning, I threw the phone on the nightstand.

“You have to go?”

I turned over to James who lied next to me on his stomach, embracing the pillow, “We have to go. In two hours and a half, we should be in Kings Cross.”

“Two hours and a half?” He snorted. “I thought we would have, like, ten minutes at most.”

I smiled, “For the record, I intend to have a shower and breakfast before we leave this house.”

“Sounds terrific,” he stretched himself. “Especially that part with a shower.”

Laughing, I got out of the bed to proceed to the bathroom where he joined me in a minute. Ordinarily, I would spend a quarter of an hour there. With James, time flew. It was around seven when we went downstairs to eat yesterday’s leftovers up and past seven when we set out for the work.

On the way, I stopped the car to make a quick run over to a coffee shop for the cardboard stand with three big paper glasses. Since I needed to drive, I gave it to DI McGraw sitting in the front seat.

“One coffee a day,” James stated as our car entered the traffic stream again.

I shot an ironical glance at him, “We’re not married.”

“The needle is stuck?” James specified caustically. He remembered me saying the similar words last night as good as I did, and that time should have been enough. I couldn’t agree with him more on this. Nevertheless, for some reason, it appeared to be beyond my strength not to bring this fact into our conversations on every occasion. I had no idea why until it dawned upon him. “Are you jealous?”

I exploded with annoyance and fury, “Why wouldn’t I be?! She always wanted to have you all for herself!” Having realised a fleeting second later what I’d just said, I sighed. “I’m sorry. I forewarned you that sometimes I fail to separate myself from him and then I barely can tell his feelings from my own.”

“And this is what he felt?”

“Pretty much so.” I couldn’t resist the urge to elaborate, though. “Don’t get me wrong, James: Thomas didn’t hate her, he simply was well aware that he was the husband and Lieutenant McGraw was the love of her life. For both of them, actually. Thomas would never hurt her, he loved her as well, but she wasn’t happy when Thomas and James overstepped the line because in a way, at that moment, she was excluded in the same manner he’d been excluded prior to that, and it was in the air between them. That, and I loved my married life: food in the fridge – to be honest, I always tend to forget to go shopping for groceries on my way home – regular sex, somebody to talk to, school runs in the mornings, family holidays with my parents, and the house, which isn’t empty when Wes isn’t there. I miss it. And your house, your wedding ring, the very fact that you’re married, it all reminds me of what I’d lost.”

“I hate to break it for you, but my marriage is nothing like yours.” His voice was muffled and tired at the same time. “There is nothing else to it except for that convincingly magnificent façade.”

“I’m sorry.”

James didn’t respond. Silence, as I’d already figured out, was his favourite defence mechanism that snapped into action every time something hit too close to home. Leaving him alone seemed to be the best way to deal with it, so I went for it. After all, if he wanted to continue talking, he would have.

Sometime later, I turned from Euston Road to Chalton Street and pulled over at the first empty parking place between a few cars parked abreast along the pavement on the right side of the street.

“Take the wheel,” I grabbed one of the paper glasses, “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Having hopped off, I walked up the street to black Lexus RX 350 parked not so far away from The Somers Town Coffee House and knocked at the window of the driver seat.

“Morning,” Dimitri rolled the widow down to exchange the glass of coffee for a piece of paper. “Her flight. London to Nassau. Departs today from Heathrow at 5pm. She’s right over there.”

I looked in the direction he pointed: Max Silver had her breakfast at one of the tables located in the street before a lovely old beige building with a brown tiled roof. She changed her appearance to be easily mistaken for an English girl: black Converse plimsolls, black skinny jeans, grey ski jacket under a blue insulated vest, braided hair, casual make-up, plenty of rings on her fingers and bracelets on her wrists, and a seedy backpack instead of an elegant handbag. I wouldn’t recognise her at first try.

“Mr MI6,” she smiled friendly at me as I approached her. “I’ve started to suspect that you won’t show up.” She pulled out of her pocket another flash drive, outwardly identical to the one she’d given me in Paris, and held it out to me. When I took it, she asked, “Are you going to follow me around today?”

This question, I wasn't going to answer. “Have a nice day.”

Thereupon, I returned to Dimitri’s car to pass the flash drive to him. He was to deliver it to the Grid where Tariq would check it and all the information on it. Dimitri drove off, and I went back to my car. As expected, James was sitting behind the wheel and sipping his coffee. Inside, I made myself comfortable – in the front passenger seat this time – before re-uniting with my own glass of coffee.

“That is Max Silver,” I nodded towards the woman I’d chatted with not so long ago. “We have to keep an eye on her from now on and until she leaves London this evening.”

“I know who she is.”

My phone rang, urging me to get engaged in working properly, which I did. While I was calling one person after another, Max finished her breakfast and got moving. McGraw tailed her, never letting her out of his sight even when I didn’t look at her, and, eventually, she led us to the British Library.

“You can’t speak on the phone there, “James stopped me when I was about to follow Mrs Silver who had disappeared behind its doors. “Stay here, I’ll watch her. If something happens, I’ll text you.”

Since my phone rang again, and I had to answer, there was nothing better for me to do but to allow him to go after her on his own. He texted shortly after entering the library. “ _She’s in the reading hall. With a big pile of old books and a couple of geographical atlases_.” I could bet that she was researching something related to that Treasure Island book. I would love to learn what exactly.

For the next few hours, I kept hanging on the phone. Incoming calls, outgoing calls. Non-stop. At some point, I got out of the car parked on Ossulson Street, opposite the British Library, to stretch my legs by strolling leisurely back and forth along the pavement and thinking of James’ birthday. I had many ideas about how to celebrate it, but only one of them seemed to be wise. Considering what he told me about his father, a couple of days with my family would be a great opportunity for him to realise that not all parents were despotic and disrespectful. Besides, it would be a perfect opportunity for my family to get to know him. Provided that he would relax enough for them to see the real James McGraw.

_She’s done. Going out._

Having sighed, I returned to the car. Max came out first, heading for Euston Road where she could catch a cab to the airport unless she wanted to miss her flight; James was right behind her.

Without any accident, we arrived to Heathrow, and I sent him onto the British Airways plane that was supposed to fly to Nassau with two airport security officers in civilian clothes. Briefing him in his role of my operation, I hardly resisted kissing him goodbye. Not that I would feel awkward subsequently if I did it in public or something, no, I simply had no idea how he would react to that. So, I did nothing but my job – I gave him all necessary instructions and marched to the Boarding Gates.

Max Silver already was there. Nevertheless, I stayed away from her until James confirmed that he and his backup got on-board. Surprisingly, she didn’t have any luggage except for that old backpack, which she kept close to herself and never let go of. It had been checked: there was nothing illegal or valuable in it as I was told. Clothes, documents, a notebook, a tablet, a phone, and a thick book.

“Mrs Silver,” I came up to her once passengers started boarding the plane.

She smiled, giving me the last flash drive, “You’re the loveliest intelligence officer I’ve ever met.”

I smiled in return, “Bon voyage!”

I watched her go through the gate together with other passengers. As she went off, I dialled the Grid, dashing to the next room, to an Indian girl in glasses from Heathrow IT department with a laptop on her knees. She plugged the flash drive, and while she was transmitting its content to Tariq, our IT specialist, who was checking it on the go, I held on the phone and glanced at my watch every now and then because slowly but surely, the plane was on its way to stand in a queue for take-off.

“Adam, it’s good,” I heard Tariq saying after the longest wait in my life.

“Stop that bloody plane!” I ordered the head of Heathrow security.

Having texted “ _You’re up_ ” to James, I called Ros and Dimitri, and less in one hour, the entire Walrus crew was arrested on both sides of the English Channel, including its leader Long John Silver. It was a very ambitious plan of mine, which had formed in my head when I was on my way back to London from Paris. Predictably, Harry, who liked to play high, had given the green light for it after I recounted it to him. Plus, we didn’t have as much to lose as we could gain if we succeeded. So far, it was a success.

The first serious problem I encountered was Max’s point-blank refusal to talk. Not only had she been keeping absolute silence since James detained her on the plane, but also she didn’t reply to my questions in the interrogation room. So long as she was facing life in prison, I offered her a reasonable deal in exchange for any information about a person who had hired the Walrus crew to break in the Brazilian embassy and kidnap one of MI5 officers. She didn’t deign to respond. In a way, she behaved as if she’d been betrayed by me, which would have been exceedingly clever of her if I’d been conscientious and insecure enough to be manipulated through my feeling of guilt and old-fashioned chivalry. To her ultimate misfortune, I’d been doing this job too long not to get to the core of her game. I even told Max at some point that it was a purely awful idea to confuse me with a stereotypical British gentleman. That, though, didn’t help me to make any progress as well, so I decided that I’d deserved a short break.

I dropped by the kitchen to pour myself a cup of black coffee that I was going to sip during my call to Ros in Paris. Perhaps, she was getting along with Mr Silver much better than I was with Mrs Silver. Leaving the kitchen, in the corridor, I almost bumped into James who was searching for me, seemingly.

“That’s the second one,” he gestured at the cup I held in my hand.

I wrinkled my nose, “You’re not serious, are you?”

“You don’t need it, Adam,” McGraw tried to take it from me.

There was no sense for him in explaining what he meant: I slept soundly last night, and he clearly planned to spend this night with me, too. On condition that I was game for sharing my bed with him. In fact, I was looking forward to it. For the reason that his proximity – not only physical caused by his standing too close to me than he was supposed to that reminded me of those hours of peaceful and quiet sleeping together, but also psychological in the form of his unobtrusive concern about me – drew me to him stronger than our deep mutual sexual attraction. It made me feel loved. It made me feel that there was so much more – not just longing or obsession – to what was going on between us.

“Okay,” I unclenched my fingers, releasing the cup. However, I couldn’t help teasing him in revenge for depriving me of my caffeine dose. “Is there anything else I can do for you, DI McGraw?”

His eyes lit up with a bouquet of emotions – from annoyance because in some ways, my tone was offensive, to desire because I bantered him in the exact same tone last night.

“Let me talk to her.”

“Why?” I stared at him in perplexity.

“Look, I know that I’m not as good at interrogating as you are—“

“I never said that!” I protested. “In fact, you’re so good at it that if you interrogated me for real on the day we met, you would break me. I just don’t understand why would you want to talk to her?”

“Because you’re stuck and I can save your ass.”

Shaking my head in pretended disbelief, I laughed. “Okay, you have ten minutes.”

 “You can watch if you want.”

Perhaps, it was just my imagination, but it sounded like he was very uncomfortable with the fact that I’d paid a compliment to his skills and given in without a fight. On the other hand, if that was so, I no longer wondered why. I would, probably, feel the same if I had been brought up by his father.

Still, I did watch. From the small room adjacent to the interrogation room in which Max Silver sat alone. Through the window that was a window for me and a mirror for everyone in the next room.

“Constable McGraw…” Max greeted James wryly as he came in.

“Detective Inspector McGraw,” he rounded her chair and stopped in front of her.

 “Oh, you’re not with MI6.”

“MI5, actually,” he placed his hands on his hips. “You see, what is your problem, Maxine? You think you know everything whereas in reality, you don’t know anything. You assume to the best of your ability and proceed from it. Just like that girl whom I was introduced to eleven years ago under the grievous circumstances. I thought that you’d grown up. Instead, you’re making the same mistake again.”

“Why in the world do you care?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” he shrugged. “I’ve just dropped in to inform you that if you keep refusing to answer their questions, I’ll tell Eleanor what happened that night in Milton Park.”

Furious as hell, Max jumped at her feet, “You promised me that she would never find out!”

“I promised to keep your secret,” DI McGraw parried with perfect calm, “I didn’t promise not to use it against you.”

“You son of bitch…”

He spread his arms, “Look at this from another perspective: I’ll tell Eleanor the truth in any case because I should have done it ages ago, so you have two options. Either, you keep your mouth shut and let you your husband take this chance to make a deal with the British government and walk away. And I don’t believe for a second that provided with it, John Silver wouldn’t sell you out as the main villain in this story about the attack on the Brazilian embassy. Afterwards, he will be a free man with a future, and you will be wasting the best years behind bars. With Eleanor who will be visiting you once a week the devil know where, and you will never have enough time to fuck her as you would love to. Or, you can make that deal. The deal that would enable you to stay in the UK with her. Your choice.”

Not waiting for her to comment on his description of her situation, he headed for the door. Two minutes after he left that room, he joined me in my room from where I observed Max pacing her room in agitation. I never thought, to be honest, that she could be forced into losing her grip completely.

“Now what?” I asked him.

“Let her think.”


	13. Decisions

It took around twenty minutes for Max Silver to make her decision. When she froze behind the chair standing in the centre of the interrogation room and said, looking at the mirror, “You want to talk? Let’s talk, DI McGraw!”, there was nothing to do for me but to return into the next room.

“I’ll tell MI5 who has hired the Walrus crew and why,” Max stated just as I overstepped the threshold. “Three conditions. Firstly, a full pardon. Secondly, John Silver mustn’t ever be released on parole. Thirdly, if Eleanor finds out the truth – with your help or without it, our deal will be annulled unilaterally. Bring the pardon, and they will have the name and all the details they may need.”

“Settled,” I nodded.

Having gone out into the corridor, I saw Sir Harry Pearce walking in my direction. For a change, he didn’t have a jacket on, only an elegant waistcoat matching the fabric his trousers were made of. At the same moment, the next door opened, and Adam himself appeared a few steps away from me.

“Harry, where you’ve been?” Adam closed the door. “Ruth called you, like, a million times.”

“The French are raving and ranting because we’ve screwed them of John Silver,” he brushed away when he drew up to me, “And Whitehall is trying to wriggle out of a diplomatic scandal. So, I sincerely hope that you’ve managed to make his wife sing like a nightingale.”

“Well, it depends on how badly Home Secretary wants to get that name because I promised her a full pardon in exchange for it.” Adam was pure imperturbability in the flesh.

“No pardon, I’m afraid,” Harry shook his head shortly. “Find some other way to pump it out of her because there is no point for me in going back to Whitehall and asking Home Secretary to sign the pardon for her after I barely managed to persuade him to let her in this country for twelve hours.”

“Let’s hope, then, that Ros will make John Silver talk somehow,” Adam stuck his hands in the front pocket of his jeans. “Unless you authorise me to torture Mrs Silver.”

Harry didn’t comment on it. There was this familiar tension in the air, which, as I’d learnt by now, indicated that they had touched upon the subject I wasn’t meant to hear anything about.

Adam wrinkled his nose, “Oh come on, Harry. He’s already up to his neck in this case, considering what he knows of L’Urca de Lima, so what if he gets stuck a little bit deeper? He’s sighed all your papers, and besides, if we initiated him into from the get-go, I wouldn’t have wasted my time looking for Hornigold nor would my Thomas Hamilton cover have, probably, been blown.”

Harry sighed. “Your cover would have been blown in any case, Adam. Upon your departure for Southampton, I’ve had our personnel files checked by Tariq. It turned out that it’d been hacked long before the attack on the Brazilian embassy, but the only file that had been downloaded was yours.”

“No wonder,” Adam gave an indifferent wrench of his shoulder. “Of us all, I’m the only one who has a family.”

“Also, you’re the only one who has a well-documented history of mental illness.” This, Harry would definitely prefer me not to hear. “That was stolen from your psychiatrist’s office as well.”

“That explains Bethlem and drugs.” Adam sounded weird. As if this cut him to the quick. “So, obviously, I was targeted as a weak link. This, I get. Still, what the hell did they want from me? And what is more interesting in the light of this witch-hunt after me, when I asked Ruth to look into who had leaked the information about the preparing attack to that asset of ours who tipped us off, he was killed. The police wrote it off as voluntarily suicide. It gives me the idea that somebody knows what we’re doing along with what we’re planning to do, and that ‘somebody’ is always a step or two ahead of us thanks to this. Who knows what we’re working on? You, me, my team, and James. I’m damn sure as hell that none of us, including James, would blab every detail of this case out accidentally or purposely. Let alone on a regular basis. Therefore, provided that you and I, we don’t discuss anything outside these walls, either we’re being watched, which is impossible because we’re checking the Grid twice a week and it’s absolutely clear, or this ‘somebody’ is connected to us, which enables him to be well up on our affairs. If so, the circle of suspects is very narrow, and if we run it through the fact that not everyone can afford hiring a computer genius who’s able to hack into our network, it will get monstrously narrow.”

“Whitehall.” Harry wasn’t surprised. “Or rather, Home Secretary. Or Prime Minister, at worst.”

Adam lowered his head to rub the bridge of his nose. As I’d noticed, he always did something like that when he was faced with something he couldn’t control and it got on his nerves. “What I fail to catch is how a Whitehall resident can be connected to that smuggler Hornigold.”

“Benjamin Hornigold served in the British Navy for three decades,” I spoke up for the first time since this conversation began. “He is likely to have a lot of friends among their ranks, and the devil knows whom they’re acquainted or related to. The United Kingdom is a small country, after all.”

“You see?” Looking at Harry, Adam pointed at me. “Exactly what we need. A fresh eye.”

Predictably, Harry chose to ignore his remark. He didn’t like me, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that his disaffection was, for some reason, directly proportional to Adam’s affection. “Ruth and Tariq will check the Whitehall staff, and you inseparable couple dig into Hornigold’s past.”

Hereon, Harry swung and walked out. Adam followed him with his eyes. When Harry was out of visibility zone, he made a vexed grimace for a second, which gave me to understand that he disagreed with his decisions although I thought that they always were in agreement with each other.

“We don’t know yet who is it, right?” Calling to mind all we’d talked about just only, I started thinking aloud. “Prime Minister or Home Secretary. Either of them can sign a pardon, and it will be signed anyway if they want Max to testify. Maybe, later than she expects, but I don’t see why the time frame should matter, honestly. So, basically, we ought to persuade her to give us the name, and if there is someone in the world who’s capable of getting it out of her, it’s my boss, Superintendent Eleanor Guthrie. So, I’ll go to the station tomorrow and try to talk her into helping us. While you…”

“Hornigold, yes.”

All day long, I was trying to choose the right moment to ask him of something, which was too much to ask of, considering that we met less than a month ago and weren’t really together at present. To prepare for that moment, I was replaying different versions of it in my head because I didn’t know how to put my request correctly. Nevertheless, when it actually turned up, this perfectly suitable moment, I wasn’t ready to proceed nor could I imagine how he would react. Worse of all, I had no idea how I would react if he turned it down. There was no turning back now, alas. It was now or never.

“By the way, if I am to go to work tomorrow, I have to drop in at my place to change my clothes because I’ve been wearing all of this for the damn straight week by now.”

He eyed me from head to foot with the face expression saying more clearly than words that he wouldn’t have any objection if I had nothing on for most of the time. “You need a lift to Charlton?”

“What I need is a place to stay until I find something in town, and I thought that maybe, I could stay with you for a couple of days or so.”

“You can stay as long as you wish,” Adam shrugged as if there was no trouble for him in what I’d asked of. “Temporary or permanently. I don’t mind. I’m positive that Wes wouldn’t mind, either.”

I was dumbfounded and at loss as to what to say. Just like when he kissed me on the riverside. All the more so it turned out that he’d learnt his lesson at first try: having burnt his fingers once for no reason, he no longer jumped to conclusions. He patiently waited for me to recover myself, instead.

“You don’t even know me…”

He smiled, “I’ll take my chances, regardless.” Then, he cast a glance at his watch, “I’m going to give a call to Ros. Assuming that you’re not in a hurry, I’ll drive you to Charlton in half an hour or so.”

“I’ll wait.”

In fact, he was done in ten minutes. Judging by what I’d overheard, sitting at Ros’ desk, she wasn’t making any progress with Long John Silver as well. Surprisingly, he wasn’t quick to shift the blame onto his better half. I almost felt sorry for him: he was protecting his wife, evidently, and she was about to betray him. No wonder she wanted to be given an official guarantee by the British government that he would be sentenced to life imprisonment. Were it my wife, had I found out what she’d done behind my back, I would have gone out of my way to get even with her for selling me out to save her neck.

This got me thinking of Miranda. Of how many things I’d forgiven her for. I trusted her as much as I could trust anyone, and in my own manner, I loved her. Not like I loved Adam, though, that was something entirely different. Yet she kept betraying me. In small quantities, but still, it hurt me a lot.

On our way to Charlton, to distract myself from these unpleasant and wounding thoughts spinning in my head with persistence worthy of a much better cause, I decided to ask the question, which wouldn’t leave me alone since Harry Pearce mentioned that Adam had visited a psychiatrist.

“A history of mental illness?”

“I suffered from PTSD after Fiona’s death.” Driving the car, he couldn’t make and keep an eye contact with me, so it looked like he didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. However, it did sound like he didn’t mind telling me. “Mental breakdowns and panic attacks at work, nightmares every night at home, suicidal tendencies, full-on depression. Funny times. Not my best memories. I did so many stupid and foolhardy things back then that Harry had to make me attend psychiatric counselling sessions.”

That explained why Harry had ordered me to come with Adam to Hampshire. What follies he had meant. Why Ros had been so disturbed when Adam was kidnapped. Why, in some ways, they all treated him like a crystal vase that easily could be broken. On the other hand, it wasn’t a big surprise that he still worked for MI5 after that. He had nothing else left to clutch at but his job and his son.

Knowing this and what he’d told me earlier about my house and my marriage, I suggested that he would stay in the car. However, he walked inside with me and settled in the living room whereas I ran upstairs to pack my clothes, footwear, and toiletries. All of it easily fit into two big sports bags. I considered taking something else along. Books, paintings, trifles of sentimental value. None of it signified anything for me, sadly. Miranda was all over them as well as this house, without a trace of me.

Prior to leaving our bedroom, I pulled out a notebook and a pen Miranda kept in the upper drawer of her nightstand out of professional habit and wrote a note for my wife.

               _“Dear Miranda,_

_Although we have both known for quite a long time by now that our marriage, at some point, has exhausted itself, I am for one taking the liberty of acknowledging it by moving out._

_James.”_

I placed the note on my nightstand together with my wedding ring, which I’d brought here since I planned to do what I was doing right now from the moment I took it off.

“Look, son—“ My father’s loud voice reached my ears as I went out of the bedroom. With his usual self-forgetful inspiration that immediately sent shivers down my spine, he was right in the middle of lecturing somebody in the living room. In the same room where Adam was awaiting me.

“I’m not your son.” The other voice, Adam’s voice – astoundingly calm, icy, and steady in comparison with an aggressive, accusing, and infuriated tone of my father – came from there in the next second. “Nor am I a kid, so stop talking to me as if I’m twelve-years-old. It’s doing my intellect of an educated adult man in. Oh, and stop yelling at me as well. Why do you Scots always yell as uncultivated yokels? I thought that three hundred years of the British rule had taught you some bloody manners.”

There was no better way to drive Alfred McGraw out of his wits. He hated the English, and Adam was an Englishman to the bone whose very existence must have been irritating him to the fullest.

“Get out!”

“If memory serves, you’re not the owner of this house nor are you my boss, so stop barking orders as if you have a right to it. I’ll show myself out not earlier than your son asks me to leave.”

When I sprang out on the staircase, I saw this unimaginable picture – Adam sat at ease in the armchair with his legs crossed, and Alfred McGraw towered in front of him as a guilty pupil. I was so used to my father wiping his feet on everyone whom he disliked, starting with me, that I barely could realise in sober reality of this very moment that Adam was tearing him, every sentence he uttered apart with tenacity of a Staffordshire bull terrier. That he stood his ground no matter what my father resorted to for the last… half an hour? An hour? An hour and a half? Two hours? I had no clue how long it had taken for me to collect and pack my things. I hadn’t glanced at my watch once a minute in so doing.

Adam noticed me first and raised at his feet. “Oh James! Have you finished yet?”

“Jimmy!” My father thundered, demanding from me to second him.

“Don’t call him that!” Adam cut in furiously. “That’s not his name.”

It was when something cracked inside me. Nobody had ever dared contradict my father before. Nobody had ever intervened between him and me. Nobody had ever shielded me from him before.

“James!” My father roared at the top of his lungs. “Tell your friend—“

“Shut the fuck up!” I snapped out in rage. “Just as he’s said, this is my house, and, as opposed to you, he’s my guest. You have no bloody right to turn him out or command me what to do to him.”

Alfred McGraw choked with anger and indignation because I’d never spoken to him in such a tone or manner before. Yet I didn’t care. All I thought of was Adam. Had I done a few days ago what I’d just done, I wouldn’t risk looking him in the eye, but he’d taught me a great lesson on Temple Pier. The lesson about trust and acceptance. When instead of running away or assuring me that I’d lost my mind or worse after he witnessed me having an emotional breakdown, he got me slowly and carefully out of the abyss into which my father and my wife had pushed me by a joint effort. Still, I was taken aback when I directed my eyes to him and saw an incredibly pleased and proud smile he was trying to hide.

Overwhelmed with my feelings to him, I ran downstairs where I dropped my bags and marched straight to him with the only goal – to kiss. In such a way that I wouldn’t need to search for the right words afterwards to express all this love and appreciation and trust and security I experienced.

“Stop soul-kissing this goddamned motherfucker!” My father bellowed.

Having pressed his forehead to mine as I tore myself off him because otherwise, we would never stopped kissing, Adam snorted merrily. I could bet that he barely refrained from bursting into laughing, and I loved him for his devil-may-care attitude as violently as I hated my father for disgust and contempt in his voice. I turned abruptly on my heels to face him.

“He doesn’t fuck your wife!” I snarled. “He fucks your son, and your son fucking loves it. So get the fuck over it because I’m not going to stop taking it in my fucking ass, and if you ever dare insult my man again, I swear I’ll borrow your bloody double-barrelled gun and blow your fucking brains out.”

Adam didn’t interfere. Silent, he stood by my side, and I sensed these massive support and full-hearted approval radiating from him with every inch of my body. It was the first time in my life when I knew that not only did somebody have my back but also sailed in the same boat with me.

In the meanwhile, my father suddenly started wheezing and panting and staggering. Growing pale, he plopped into the other armchair and clutched at his heart.

“Heart attack,” Adam commented imperturbably.

I gazed at him in surprise, “How could you…?”

“My parents are doctors,” he explained with a smile. “Dad is a surgeon; mum is a paediatrician. Since my age of six and up to the day I joined the SIS, I planned to become a doctor, so I even read some of my parents’ medical textbooks. I may not remember much, though, but that—“ Adam pointed at my father. “That does look like a heart attack, so theoretically, we need to call an ambulance.”

I cast a look at my father. He was pathetic and helpless, fully dependent on me. I could kill him. I could save him. Yet I was unwilling to decide his fate. There was only one thing I wanted to do.

Not giving it a second thought, I turned to Adam, “Let’s go home.”

He simply nodded in agreement, which impressed me beyond measure for the reason that Miranda – were she in his shoes right now – would have tried to appeal to my humanity or manipulate me into coming to my father’s rescue. She was firmly convinced that she knew better what I should do whereas Adam didn’t bother to think for me. In his opinion, I was capable of making my own decisions.

Having picked up my bags, we left the house, which no longer was mine in any sense of this word. He went out first; I followed him after leaving my keys on the kitchen counter. In one way or another, this chapter of my life was finished, and by slamming the door behind me, I turned the page over.


	14. Trapped

On Tuesdays, Superintendent Eleanor Guthrie attended the middle management meeting at Wood Street police station and usually returned by lunch at the earliest. Knowing this, I would have been glad to be lying in bed until noon, but Adam had to be at work by 9 o’clock sharp, so we got up at 7 together and he drove the long way round to drop me off at my station.

To while away the time, I honestly tried to work; however, all my thoughts were revolving around the last night. Yesterday, we stopped to eat out on the way to Barnet, so as soon as when we got home, I dragged him along straight to the bedroom. The night before, having laid hold of each other for the first time, we both flew off our rockets, and had this insanely primeval sexual intercourse, which started in the kitchen, continued on the stairs, and ended on the bedroom’s floor. Last night, after what happened in my house, I let my feelings to him loose, and the result of it was lazy, sensual sex accompanied by a lot of laughter, falls from the bed, and a chain of endless discoveries. One of them was a joyful grin he had on his lips while he – exhausted and satisfied – was dropping off to sleep with his head on my shoulder. I couldn’t stop thinking of it. Every time I recalled it, I ran my fingers over my lips, supressing a smile.

And every time I did this, Constable Bones sitting across our two tables from me shot a weird glance at me. To his fortune, although he, obviously, found my behaviour weird, he didn’t attempt to comment on it or ask questions. That wouldn’t end well for damn sure however relaxed and harmless I was today thanks to Adam who was flirting with me via text messages every now and then. Even that fact that I couldn’t file for divorce from Miranda straight away was unable to upset my good mood. What if absurdly, my adultery couldn’t be the ground because for this to be accepted by court, I needed to have sex with a woman, not with a man? I could well wait for two years or five. Not that Adam and I were going to break up next week or next year. That, I was, for some reason, absolutely sure of.

Eleanor stormed in at noon and immediately locked herself up in her office. Apparently, her morning wasn’t as bright as mine. We would see what would happen to her mood when she learnt that her precious Max had been back in the United Kingdom and why she had left it in the first place.

I was about to go knock at her door when the local HMIC team led by the notorious Edward Low himself – a Viking-looking man in his early thirties with flowing light brown hair - entered the room. Everyone stopped talking at once. We the police officers of any rank in any department hated them intensely so long as they earned their living by rummaging in the police dirty linen to wash it in public and were directly responsible for early retirement of many good coppers. Especially, detectives. Having seen their arrival from her office, Superintendent Guthrie sprang out.

“What this is about?” She demanded with her hands on her hips.

Perhaps, she wasn’t popular among us, yet she was a cop and, most importantly, our boss, the only one who could oppose them on legal grounds, so detectives, experts, and uniforms silently and unanimously expressed their support for her by closing down their ranks behind her back.

Edward Low surveyed the room, “Detective Inspector James McGraw.”

“He’s not here,” she cut short. “He’s on sick leave until Monday.”

“Oh I have plenty of time,” he came close to her and smirked straight to her face. “So I can very well wait in your comfortable office while you call him and order to drop by at the station.”

She didn’t falter. I’d never thought much of her father, this spoilt child of fortune in some ways, but her mother was a woman of strong character, which Eleanor seemed to have inherited in full.

“You will wait in the corridor,” she uttered distinctly, “As a civilian would do.”

“Just try turning me out of here, love,” Low stated as tenderly as it was possible for him. “And I will have you investigated and publicly tried for abuse of your power. Whoever your fucking daddy is.”

Constable Bones jumped at his feet. Sometimes, these young hotheads really didn’t understand when somebody attempted to scare the pants off them and got in one hell of trouble because of it.

I grabbed my phone to text Adam. “ _Might not come home tonight. Stuck at work_.”

“As I see, you haven’t changed a bit,” I threw my phone back on my desk. “Still jacking up your budget price by bullying young girls who, additionally, are shorter than you. How manly of you, Ned.”

“Oh Jim,” he broke into a smile that was more a bared teeth than a real smile when he found me with his watery eyes, one of his which had dense corneal leukoma. It was my doing, actually. Around twelve years ago, when I was Constable and patrolled the streets of Portsmouth, my partner and I were sent to put a drunk bar fight to an end. Somehow, it happened so that Low and I squared off. I injured his eye by striking his face whole-heartedly against the wall built of untooled stone. He hated the police and me personally ever since. “Nice to see that you’re up to now dancing attendance on the Guthries.”

That was the whole other part of our history. At that time, Richard Guthrie was Superintendent at Hampshire Constabulary. He addressed the complaint Low had made against me on the next day so thoroughly that I got away with infliction of a severe bodily harm effortlessly because… How did Richard put it? “One eye of a drunk Brit isn’t worth damaging a career of the Scot in the English police force.”

I rose from my desk, “You’ve made all this way to here to chat with me about it?”

“Why else would I come here if not to catch up with you?” Low smirked.

“You have the right to the solicitor,” Eleanor interfered. “Wait until I call de Groot.”

“We sure as hell will wait.” Ned gestured with an air of nonchalance towards the interrogation rooms, “Right over there.” After that, he shifted his cold, predatory gaze to my face, “Shall we?”

A few minutes later, I found myself sitting at the table in Interrogation Room 5, the same room where I failed to get Adam talking, on the same chair he sat on that day. In contrast with him back then, I wasn’t arrested or handcuffed, though, but somehow, this made me feel close to him by providing insight into what it had been like for him to be here with me as an interviewer. I wasn’t polite or patient, nor was I charming or remarkable; however, according to Adam himself, I managed to impress him, the experienced intelligence officer. Even if so, I could bet that Ned Low wasn’t going to be impressed.

Just like I wasn’t impressed by his decision not to follow the procedure when he didn’t bother to wait for de Groot to arrive or turn the recorder on although HMIC had always been so proud of being completely different from the police. Better than the police. I wasn’t surprised as well because it was kind of predictable that anything might be sacrificed by him in the name of personal vendetta. What did impress and surprise me was a batch of surveillance photographs that he spread all over the table in silence. Adam in his Thomas Hamilton disguise and I were in each of them. Together. Every single meeting we had while he was undercover looking for Hornigold. How possibly could neither of us not notice that we’d been watched? I could have missed it, yes, I wasn’t a professional spy, but Adam?

“You really have a crush on me, Ned,” I settled back and folded my arms.

“Oh I have a crush on every dirty cop in this area, but you’re, undoubtedly, my favourite,” he bended over to the briefcase, which was leaned against one of the table legs. His assistant had given it to him before he entered the room after me. Having fished some folder out, he straightened up and opened it. “Thomas Hamilton. Arrested during the roundup on 20th of March. Released in a few hours. Interrogated by DI McGraw with whom he’s been seen since then.” Edward Low slammed the folder demonstratively and stared at me. “Well, Jim, how much Mr Scott pays you for tipoffs through him?”

I shrugged, “Check my bank account.”

“You’re not that stupid, are you?” Ned put the folder aside. I didn’t deign to answer, so he bended over this briefcase again. This time, he tossed the plastic bag with the money that Adam had had with him when he got busted on the table between us. “It was found in one of your desk’s drawers.”

“So?”

Low screwed up his eyes, “You could go straight to jail for this, Jim.”

“I could?” My intuition overdeveloped by the years of police and, especially, detective work prompted me that there was some catch right around the corner. “But, apparently, I won’t?”

“I’m not here because of you,” he snorted arrogantly. “I don’t give a damn about you. For the time being. All I want is Richard Guthrie’s head on a silver platter, and you’re going to deliver it.”

“No.”

“Cops tend to have an exceedingly hard time in prison,” his voice was soft and deceptively caring, “and I’m going to see personally that you will have the hardest of them all.”

“Go ahead because I’ve got zero to tell you.”

“Let it be as you wish, then,” he rose from the table. “Detective Inspector James McGraw, you’re under arrest for corruption, conspiracy, and disclosure of sensitive information.”

The rest didn’t matter: I was searched, registered, and put in a cell. Also, I was offered to ring somebody up, but I refused. Knowing Ned, I would be offended if he didn’t tap my phone conversation with whomever I called to use it against me afterwards. To blackmail or drown me. That, and I could handle this shit on my own since it wasn’t my first dance ever. I just needed to think it all through.

As the cell door was shut behind me, I went to a bunk located along the perpendicular wall and climbed onto it to sit cross-legged and rest my back against the wall. Nevertheless, instead of my burning issue, I thought of Adam, or rather I guessed in which cell he had to wait until Eleanor appointed me to interrogate him. It was funny, actually, to recall how Adam Carter stormed into my life a bit less than a month ago and turned it upside down and inside out before I knew it. Amazingly, it didn’t throw me off. Quite the contrary, Adam and my relationship with him helped me to find that part of myself, which I’d lost long ago, and thanks to that, at present, I was myself more that I’d ever been before. And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Arrested, locked up, faced with a public trial in the event that I wouldn’t give Richard Guthrie up soon, I, for the first time in a long time, was at peace with myself and my life.

Unfortunately, the world wasn’t keeping in step with me. I sensed how awfully we had been mistiming recently when the door suddenly opened and my wife whom I’d had left behind in any sense of this word appeared on the threshold of my cell. It was obvious that as opposed to me, Miranda didn’t have much sleep last night nor was she in mellow spirits. Ordinarily, these shadows under her dark brown eyes and her downcast mood were enough to make me feel guilty. Not today.

“Your father had a heart attack,” she announced gloomy as soon as the closed door cut us off from the outside world. “I found him in the living room when I got home yesterday. He’s in hospital right now, and, judging from what the doctors have said to me, the prognosis is quite optimistic.”

“Lucky bastard.” I didn’t even try to hide my vexation. On the other hand, his death was the best birthday gift my father would have never given me until he was capable of having it his way.

Frankly, Miranda was blown away by my expressive reaction. Still, she continued, “I also found your keys on the kitchen counter. Please, tell me that you weren’t there when he had a stroke. Please, tell me that I’m terribly wrong assuming that you were and you left him to the mercy of the fate!”

“And if I did?”

Overflown with the storm of diverse emotions caused by my misdeed, my wife did her utmost to collect herself. Dealing with me, she couldn’t let herself yell at me with might and main – I was a child so she had to be patient and calm. “Whatever you two have fallen out over, I think if you apologize—“

I didn’t hear any word that followed. I was in that dusty, half-empty house again where we were arguing about some book, where she was taking care of me… In that modest kitchen. On some other day. Standing face to face with her wearing this violet corseted dress. And I heard myself uttering…

_“It requires an intolerable sacrifice.”_

_She was taken aback. “To accept a pardon?”_

_“To apologize!”_

_“Apologize?” Miranda raised her eyebrows in confusion. “Who will you be apologizing to?”_

_For a few seconds, I lost my grip. How could she not see it? How could she not understand it? She who had been there when it all became a part of our lives, when it all altered them for good?_

_“To England!” I roared. “They took everything from us, and then, they called me a monster. The moment I sign that pardon, the moment I ask for one, I proclaim to the world that they were right.” I twisted with pain. “This ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around.”_

_Yet she still hoped to exhort me. “This path you’re on, it doesn’t lead where you think it does.”_

_Unable to listen to her any longer, I stormed out and slammed the door to prevert her cry of the heart in the form of her “If he were here, he’d agree with me” from reaching me outside._

Back in my reality, I growled, “Like hell I will!”

“Recently, whatever I say, you explode with anger.” Her voice was unsteady. “You left me at the Brazilian embassy after the attack and didn’t even tell me where you were going. You didn’t call once to check up on me nor did you ask afterwards how I was feeling. You haven’t been returning my calls ever since, you slept on the sofa until you suddenly moved out. You gadded the devil knows where when you should be at work until you winded up in hospital. And now this?! What’s got into you, James?!”

In disbelief, I almost laughed, “It’s really fucking lovely of you to not concede for a second that I’ve been acting strangely as you described my behaviour to my father on the phone while I was in hospital because I’m erratic and spontaneous by nature. Not as rational and upright as you think I am. But no, all you see is this image of me you’ve created in your mind. Sorry if the real me doesn’t match!”

“Oh don’t you dare depict me as a bay guy here!” She was on the verge of flying into rage. “I’ve done everything for you! You’ve left Darby for you. I’ve married you. I’ve always been there for you. I’ve loved you, and what I’ve got in return? Nothing! Not a thing except for this sickening feeling that I’m the only one who’s been trying to prevent this fucking marriage from falling to pieces.”

At some point, Miranda started screaming at me. This tore me out of my reality, away from her, to fling back to another long forgotten place in time, to the other her. Into the other situation that was extremely important – in so many aspects – although there was no way for me to remember why.

_I was almost shocked to see her picking her way through a crowd of pirates in the street. She headed in my direction, both tired and worried sick while everyone was gawking at her. Having parted ways with somebody I’d just chatted with, I came up to her, intending to lead as far away as possible._

_“What are you doing here?”_

_She tried to keep her voice low. “I need to speak with you alone.”_

_I looked around, at all those hostile, covertly curious, unfriendly, and lustful faces. “You need to leave here right now. I will see you when I am able.”_

_She wouldn’t listen, though. She never did. She was too strong-willed and proud for it. “I have come upon some information, which changes things for you. You must not move against that fort.”_

_“Miranda, you don’t understand what’s going on.”_

_Unsurprisingly, it drove her mad. “I understand why you need that fort. I understand why you need that gold. I understand why you need this island. I understand it all because I was there the day our lives ended and all of this began, but I have been devoted to you since that day.” Her voice was full of pain and despair, which she, nevertheless, managed to keep supressing to be able to say all she had to say to me. “I have been loyal and protective and fucking committed to you since that day. And I am asking you to come with me so that I can save your life.” After this, she walked out on me._

Her “so that I can save your life” echoed in my head while everything in me rebelled against following her, talking to her, and, most of all, lending an ear to her. Somehow, I knew it was a mistake.

“I think, for a change, instead of trying to save it, you’d better come to terms with the fact that I do not want this marriage to exist any longer,” I emphasized dryly. “In other words, I’m not coming back home, Miranda, so, please, stop acting like I will. Our marriage is over. We are done. For good.”

Miranda Barlow wouldn’t be Miranda Barlow, though, if she gave up this easily, “You have to.”

“Really?” I grinned unkindly. I never liked it very much when somebody attempted to tell me what I should or should not do. “Why the fuck would I do that, I’m asking you?”

“Because I’m pregnant!”


	15. Loyalty

I laughed, “You’re kidding, right?”

Miranda pulled something out of her olive green trench coat’ pocket and held out to me. She hadn’t been allowed to take her handbag along to my cell, so this was how she’d brought this small right-angled picture taken and printed during the ultrasound examination with her name written on it here. Impartial proof of her pregnancy, which I couldn’t question however badly I wanted to.

“Since I’m more than sure that you’re going to keep the baby, this is what I think of it.” I snatched the black and white photograph from her hand and crumpled before putting it back.

Miranda was offended and perplexed. Apparently, she hadn’t expected of me to react this harsh although I’d given her to understand more than once that I didn’t want to have children. As if she’d never believed that I’d been damn serious every bloody time I spoke against starting a family.

“Why the hell am I surprised, indeed?” I spread my arms. “If you’ve never asked my opinion on anything? You didn’t even come here to consult with me about what to do to the baby, you came to face me with the accomplished fact, the result of the decision you’d made without me.”

“You like children, James.” She seemed to be torn between despair and timid hope. “I know that, and that’s why I simply fail to comprehend why you’re so strongly against having our own child.”

“It’s all that matters to you?” Now I was at loss of words. “Don’t you fucking understand in what kind of a family it will have to be growing up if it’s born? Or you really think that a mother, a father, and a house are enough?” I raised my voice to a shout, “Look at me: I have parents, I have grandparents, I have a brother, I have two nieces and a nephew, I have an ancestral home, the fucking real estate, but I would rather die than return there, to all of them. Perhaps, I’m a hard-hearted, ungrateful, selfish cynic, but I do not want my child to go through what I’ve gone through on their account.”

My wife sighed heavily, “James, I know that your family isn’t perfect, nor is mine. No family is perfect, in fact, but we aren’t our parents, we aren’t our families. I love you, James, I love you with all my heart, and I want to raise this child—“ She pressed her palm to her stomach, “with you.”

“Miranda, my sweet, I don’t love you,” I admitted aloud, astonished myself by how empowering and refreshing this confession turned out to be for me. “I never did. I was infatuated with you, that’s true, but as opposed to love, which normally lasts, infatuation fades out with time. This is what happened to me. Maybe, we could have go on despite it. Why the hell not? Many couples have done that before us. Many will do it after us. Why wouldn’t we? And I would even have agreed to it because this is what I, as a man, should… what I’m expected to do in the light of your pregnancy, if only…”

I paused to choose the right words to clothe the facts in, but there were no words. There were only recollections. Of that deafening sound when the gun fired. Of his blood on my face. Of my father heaping abuse on me, naked and helpless. Of my shook and inner pain. Of my tears, which nobody had seen. Of my fear and hatred to myself. Of those days in mental hospital. Of my own silent promise to myself that nobody would ever hear from me the truth about what had happened on that day.

Then, there were other recollections. Of me coming home after a lonely week in hospital and running into my father. Of him reprimanding me for acting strangely. Of Miranda standing aside instead of doing something. Of me darting out of my own house and walking in complete indifference as to wherever my feet took me. Of the turbid water of the Thames River that lured me to itself. Of my mobile phone beeping in my pocket. Of that text message from Adam. Of this weak hope that, maybe, he wouldn’t turn his back upon me. Of Adam listening to me. Of me not daring look him in the eye because I was ashamed of that truth I’d let him in.

I still was so ashamed that suddenly, I lost my touch with reality once again to find myself standing in front of the stairs led down to some empty tavern.

_I was about to walk down when her voice reached me, coming from behind my back. “There is no other way once you’re willing to tell the truth about your intentions here.”_

_I swung on my heels, “I think that I’ve made my intentions very clear.”_

_“No,” Miranda shook her head softy. “You’ve been anything but clear. You say you fight for the sake of Nassau, for the sake of your men, for the sake of Thomas and his memory, but the truth of the matter is, it isn’t for any of those things.”_

_Angry and wounded, I stepped towards her. Perhaps, there hadn’t been a single moment ever before when I would want to kill her more than now. “What the fuck do you think I am fighting for?!”_

_“I think you are fighting for the sake of fighting because it’s the only state in which you can function!” She was angry as hell. “The only way to keep that voice in your head from driving you mad!”_

_“What are you talking about? What voice?!”_

_“The one telling you to be ashamed of yourself for having loved him!” Stabbed right in my heart, I sat down with no strength left while she continued sticking to her guns, “You were told that it was shameful, and part of you believed it. Thomas was my husband. I loved him and he loved me, but what he shared with you, it was entirely something else. It’s time you allowed yourself to accept that.”_

_“The only thing I am ashamed of is,” I uttered quietly, not looking at her, “that I didn’t do something to save him when we had the chance. That instead, I listened to you.”_

_Before leaving me alone, Miranda after a second of hesitation put the book on the table in front of me. That very book Thomas had given to me so that I took it along wherever I went. To remember him. What we had. The only thing I had left that connected me to him. I opened it and with my fingers, touched the words written by his hand on its title page. “James, my truest love. Know no shame. T.H.”_

It was when I finally realized how sick and tired I’d grown of being ashamed. How disgusting it was for me to keep hiding. How disrespectful it was. How infinitely cowardly of me it was. And what Adam, this truly amazing man, deserved. What I myself deserved. What our relationship deserved.

I sighed, “To be straight, Miranda, I could have easily kept cheating on you with the man I’ve been seeing for the last month whether you liked it or not. The ultimate problem is, I love and respect this man too much to reduce him to my lover, so I’ve left you to spend the rest of my days with him.”

“You arsehole…” She made to hit me, but I caught her hand before it touched my face and squeezed it with a good half of my strength. “James, you’re hurting me…”

Her face distorted with pain. I knew that I mustn’t do that to her because she was a woman, but I couldn’t shake off this anger directed to her. I wanted to tear her to pieces. How could she keep clinging to the long-dispelled illusion of us being happily married so stubbornly, so desperately, so confidently if, in fact, we’d never been spouses for real? Lovers at best? How could she assume that I had no idea about what I was doing, therefore, I should be advised, corrected, and guided as if I didn’t have my own head on my shoulders? How could she not notice that my relationship with my father wasn’t full of misunderstandings caused by our differences, it was broken beyond repair and not through my fault? And, most of all, how could she just stand there and do nothing?

“I trusted you,” I hissed to her face, “And you betrayed me. It almost cost me my fucking life. I will never forget it. I will never forgive it. So, I hope that next time you decide to waive off my opinion on anything at all, starting with the divorce papers that will be sent to you sooner or later, the memory of this—“ I squeezed her wrist with all my strength, “will help you to refrain from it. For your own sake. Don’t be mistaken, my dear, I might haven’t fought for myself before, but now I will. Even with you.”

As I unclasped my fingers, she moved backwards, rubbing her wrist mechanically, and knocked at the door so that the police officer who stood guard in the corridor would let her out of my cell.

Perhaps, I insulted and humiliated her beyond measure although she might not deserve it. We weren’t all persons of excellent judgement every so often, after all. Yet I felt relieved. As if I hadn’t made the same terrible mistake by letting myself be led by her once again. As if I’d just saved her life. As if this justified everything I’d done. However wrong, horrible, and mean it was of me to have done it.

I didn’t manage to proceed any of these striking revelations properly, though, because the door opened, and this time, it was Eleanor herself. Without any escort.

“My father is here,” Superintendent Guthrie beckoned me to come into the corridor. “Let’s go drink something while he and Low are practising their inexhaustible brilliance in my office.”

So, she did call him instead of de Groot. Smart girl, I was willing to give her that. Smart enough to figure out what her life would have been turned into if after putting on my thinking cap, I had decided to present Edward Low with some part of what he wanted to know of her father’s shady dealings. I was flattered a little by the fact that Commissioner Guthrie had condescended to come at our station in person to scare the HMIC pack off. For the reason that I’d seriously thought I would have sweated, figuratively speaking, to get him involved in rescuing us both from serving time behind bars. And I’d intended to make up some intricate plan to achieve this goal of mine while resting in the cell. Fortunately, today, some of my problems seemed to be sorting themselves out without my assistance.

We walked downstairs to the cafeteria where she poured herself a cup of coffee with milk whereas I went for a cup of hot chocolate. Then we found an empty table by the window to sit at.

Eleanor wouldn’t beat about the bush. “Billy said that you were waiting for me.”

I raised my eyebrow, “He’s Billy now?”

She shot a sizzling look at me. Her mood evidently hadn’t got any better, which wasn’t exactly a big surprise for me so long as Richard wasn’t best friends with his daughter.

“Max is back.”

“Why would I care?” As much as she tried to be indifferent, her eyes gave her away. Her feelings to Max – her first love – clearly were pretty much alive and kicking; otherwise, she wouldn’t have unsettled by my mention of her nickname this deeply. Sadly, I was to knock her out of the saddle.

“That night, I was in the middle of drinking my ass off with my friend Mark in a pub in Old Portsmouth,” I didn’t enjoy recalling that story in the least. “Around midnight, I got a call from work about a girl found in Milton Park by a local resident who took his dog for a walk there. I was told that she was severely beaten, half-naked, in shook, shying away from anyone trying to come up to her, and repeating my name. When I arrived at the scene… To spare you the details, that girl was gang-raped. About eight of them. Some had been up for two rounds. She told me everything, and we caught those dickheads on the next day. She was ready to testify, and she did testify, but, as it often happens in rape cases, she – the actual victim – was the one to blame because she is beautiful, and sexy, and all that chauvinistic bullshit. After the trial, one of her rapists confronted her in the street and said that he and his friends liked fucking her so much that they were going to do it again in the nearest future. She should have turned to me, you know, my friend and I would have had a decent hear-to-heart with them as a result of which none of them would have ever able to have sex; however, she… She packed her things and disappeared. A couple of years later, there was a train of homicides in Portsmouth. It was written off as a gang war although in fact, it looked like a train of ordered hits performed by a professional killer for hire. All the victims were those rapists. Every single one of them.”

“I remember those homicides,” Eleanor frowned, not understanding yet what I was implying. “The biggest shit ever occurred in Pompey. The entire county was buzzing about it back then.”

“I promised not to disclose the name of that girl to anyone,” I took a sip of chocolate to wet my throat, “and I kept this secret because it was the only thing I could do for her. Even if I’ve always thought that you must know that this story is why Max has dumped you by leaving the town all of a sudden.”

“Max?” She was baffled. “What on earth she has to do with any of it?”

“She is that girl, Eleanor, and right now, she’s in trouble,” I put my half-empty cup on the table and coupled my fingers. “Much bigger than that gang of neo-Nazis that was turned on by her skin colour. She’ll wind up inevitably in maximum security prison for life if she doesn’t tell our government the name of the person who is behind the attack on the Brazilian embassy anytime soon.”

“You reckon on my help with getting it out of her?” Superintendent Guthrie jumped at her feet in split second. “You know what? Fuck you, James!”

And she walked out on me. Positively, I had the gift of setting women against me.

Having finished drinking my hot chocolate, I walked upstairs. However passionately I wanted to go to Adam wherever he was straight away, I needed to collect my phone from my desk first since I couldn’t afford buying a new one every two weeks or so and have a word with Richard Guthrie about Ned Low and his accusations. To my greatest surprise, Low and his henchmen were nowhere to be seen on our floor and everyone was chatting in their usual manner on the phone or with each other.

Commissioner Guthrie, nevertheless, still was in his daughter’s office. All alone, he was reading some police forms. Our reports, most likely. I came by without preceding myself with a knock.

“I guess I should thank you,” I closed the door to lean against it.

Not stopping reading, he glanced at me. “You should thank Harry Pearce who explained to Mr Low why he shouldn’t mess with MI5 by documenting their undercover operations exceedingly understandably.” I snorted, envisioning it – Harry and me having such a conversation. In return, Richard raised his head and frowned in the same manner as his daughter had done a bit earlier, “You know what I hate about you most of all?” I shrugged. How could I possibly know? “I’ve always been certain that given a chance, you would sell me lock, stock, and barrel without hesitation. Yet when you were actually given such a chance, you took the bullet instead, which makes me wonder where you and I really stand.”

“Keep wondering.”

He clenched his teeth to control his irritation caused by my condescension. “None the less, I’m suspending you for three months to remind you that you work for me, not for Harry Pearce KBE.”

Of course, for all the tea in China, he wouldn’t miss the opportunity of showing me who was in charge here to avenge that hole I’d made in his hand. I’d got off easy, though, because I’d thought that he would throw me to the wolves to save his neck if such an opportunity ever arose. I pulled out my badge and tossed onto Eleanor’s desk. “Have a nice day, Richie. See you in three months.”

I left the door wide open and proceeded to my desk to grab my phone. While I was out of range, Adam had send me a text message. “ _Call me if you need to be picked up_.” However, I chose to get back to Barnet on my own and drop in at a supermarket to buy groceries in passing all the more so Adam would have forgotten to do it invariably even if I reminded him. My reasoning was very simple: if, thanks to Richard’s wounded pride, I wouldn’t be having anything to be occupied with for the next quarter, then I was going to run our house. Living with Miranda, I’d never cared about it, but living with Adam, I wouldn’t mind taking cooking, doing laundry, and all that jazz upon myself. Why the hell not?

It was around seven when I came home. Yet, magically, Adam was already here since his work car was parked by the pavement in front of the house. As I shut the door, his hurried steps reached my ears. Immediately after, barefooted Adam in his unbuttoned shirt and jeans appeared on the stairs.

“Hi!” He broke into a sincerely happy smile at my sight.

Having run down, he cupped my face in his hands and kissed me. It felt like we hadn’t seen each other for a week at minimum whereas in reality, we’d spent one working day apart. On the other part, perhaps, this really was the case, considering that I could well haven't returned to him for the nearest ten years or so. At any rate, I didn’t begin to look into it. I had better plans for tonight, including eating homemade lasagne, watching a football game, taking a shower together, and having sex. A lot of sex.

My phone rang out of the blue as soon as I thrust my arms under Adam’s shirt to put them round his waist and pulled him to myself. Naturally, my fist impulse was to hurl it at the wall, so with this as my sole goal in my mind, I dragged it out of my leather jacket’s pocket. Then, I caught the glimpse of the number dancing at its screen and and stepped back from Adam to answer.

“Eleanor?”

“Where is she?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“So, how the fuck am I supposed to get out of her what they need?” Judging by her tone, she considered this phone call to be the worst idea of all she had ever hit on in her whole life.

“Hold on,” I said to her and looked at Adam. “She wants to talk to Max.”


	16. Doubt

Next morning, James met Superintendent Eleanor Guthrie on the ground floor and led her to the interrogation room where I had Max Silver dispatched. When the attractive blonde-haired woman of average height came in, Max sitting on the chair in the centre of the empty room jumped at her feet.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Eleanor demanded as soon as James joined me in the next room to watch them talk from here. “About why you actually dumped me out of the blue?”

“And what would you do if I did?”

“My father was Superintendent at Hampshire Constabulary—“

“Your father wouldn’t lift a finger to help me!” Max screamed out, cornered and exposed. “Did you forget?! He made it crystal clear that he didn’t approve of your choice of me as your girlfriend.”

“He may not approve of whom I date, but his power, he loves a great deal more than me,” Eleanor raised her voice as well. “What happened to you was a defiance to his power. He would have done anything to quell it, but it didn’t matter, did it? You just decided that you could deal with this shit on your own because it’s is you, after all. The self-sufficient, independent, strong, proud Maxine Elhabda who doesn’t need anyone’s help, including mine. Tell me – was it worth it? Running away from me to get them killed? Is it worth it now? Life in prison? Is this worth keeping your fucking silence?”

“You don’t understand what’s going on here, Eleanor.” Mrs Silver folded her arms defensively. “You’re just doing what James bloody McGraw has manipulated you into doing… As he always did.”

“He’s trying to save your fucking life!” Ms Guthrie exclaimed. “I’m trying to save your life!”

“Go to hell, Eleanor!” Max was the embodiment of the deadly sin of arrogance. “I got this!”

Having stepped back, Eleanor shook her head in disappointment. “You haven’t changed a bit. I came here hoping that you’ve grown up, and you’re still that girl who thinks that she can count only on herself even if the decisions she makes are wrong. I came here hoping that, maybe, we still have a chance, but we never had it, right? However hard I tried…” She paused to take control of her emotions, which were about to burst out. “You know what? I’m done trying, Max. Do as you please.”

As Eleanor turned on her heels to march to the door, James looked at me, “I’ll show her out. I have a few things to do in town, so see you at home.”

“Sure,” I nodded.

His job – or rather Eleanor’s job – was done. James was visibly disappointed because he expected that Max would tell her ex-girlfriend everything whereas I agreed to their meeting to use Ms Guthrie to break Mrs Silver down morally. The rest I could do myself. Frankly, I thought it to be a long, exhausting ride for both parties; however, when James walked out to accompany Eleanor through our security and I diverted my full attention back to Max, I found her sitting by the farthest wall. Having curled up in the manner of a small child, she embraced her knees and buried her face in them.

Intending to make hay while the sun shone, I went in the interrogation room. Max gave me to understand that she'd heard my approaching steps by raising her head as I reached her. She was crying, and I could bet all my money on her tears not being fake. Well, all is fair in love and war…

“Peter Ashe,” she muttered gloomy. “We met through his daughter Abigail who had flew to Paris to study the French language. My assistant Lola was her teacher and our go-between.”

“What did he hire you to do for him?”

“We had to deliver a high-ranking MI5 officer and kill the Brazilian ambassador.”

“In exchange for what?”

“The Ashe family owns many antiquities,” she grinned crookedly. “Including the 18th century map of the Caribbean drawn by Captain James Flint himself. My dear husband believes that this mad pirate ciphered the location where the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet had sunk off in it.”

“Did you get the map?”

“No,” she shook her head. “He didn’t get his spook, nor did the ambassador die.”

“But you still kept researching,” I reminded dryly. “You even did your best to work your way to London by selling the Walrus crew out for it. Was something else up?”

She sobbed. “Somebody else offered us a deal with this map at stake, but I don’t know who because John was communicating with this person and I don’t know how this person came into contact with him or what they agreed upon. All I know is that he asked me to keep researching. Which I did.” I didn’t move, towering over her, so she looked me in the face, “That’s all I know, I swear to God.”

Not that I believed her since I saw clearly that she’d lied to me just now, but this lie wasn’t as relevant as what she’d revealed to me before. That was why I left her in the interrogation room and rushed back to our room and from there - into Harry’s office. My face expression turned out to be the valid reason for him to promise that he would call back to whomever he was speaking to.

“It’s Home Secretary,” I announced as he hung up the phone. “Worst of all, she hasn’t invented it. Benjamin Hornigold attended Dartmouth with Tobias Ashe, Peter’s big brother who was killed in the Iraq War, and Hornigold’s first cousin Camilla Parker is married to Ashe’s Chief of Staff. What I don’t get is why would he look for L’Urca de Lima? Isn’t he supposed to know its current whereabouts?”

Harry pressed the button on his landline phone and, when Ruth answered, said to her, “Ruth, come here and bring everything you have on Peter Ashe along.” Then, he explained to me, “After that guard was caught, Prime Minister and Chancellor pursued the matter of relocating L’Urca de Lima and decided that from that day forward, we must operate on a ‘need-to-know’ basis to keep this story from leaking to the press, so Home Secretary, Defence Secretary, and the others weren’t informed.”

He stopped talking to let Ruth, our Senior Intelligence Analyst, made herself comfortable in the chair before his desk. I preferred to keep standing because I was too strung-up to sit. “Max Silver claims that the Walrus crew was hired by Peter Ashe, and Adam has unearthed the connection between the Ashe family and Benjamin Hornigold,” Harry recapped to her dryly. “What did you find?”

“I found this,” she opened the thick folder, which she had placed on her lap, and laid out a pile of surveillance photographs on the desk. Peter Ashe and Miranda Barlow were in each of them. Together, in different outfits, with different hairstyles, spotted in different places. Hadn’t I known better than to believe everything I saw unconditionally, I would have decided that they had been having an affair. “Apparently, they met around twelve years ago when she wrote a series of articles on the new faces of British politics. In her article dedicated to Ashe, she prognosticated his brilliant career as we know it and, most importantly, she wrote, I quote, “after trying his wings as Home Secretary, the next summit he is likely to conquer will be Number 10.” It gets more interesting,” Ruth took another pile of photographs from her folder and put them above the others on Harry’s desk. In them, Miranda Barlow kissed or hugged a tall dark-haired man. “This is Fabio Campos, the British journalist of Portuguese heritage, who was shot in Southampton ten years ago. The local police admitted that it was an assassination but failed to catch a shooter. Maybe, intentionally. I spoke with Campos’ editor, and he confirmed that Fabio had worked on the article about corruption in the British ruling circles and had steel proof of several officials being light-fingered, including Peter Ashe and Richard Guthrie, but all his materials had disappeared after he was murdered. Thus, the scandal that could sink many promising careers never broke out, and less than three months later, Miranda Barlow all of a sudden married James McGraw known for his close linkage to the Guthrie family. With whom, she was at the Brazilian embassy when it was attacked by the Walrus crew. Speaking of the Brazilians,” she got one more pile of photographs out of her folder to scatter about the desk before Harry and me. “Miranda Barlow studied at the same university as Suzana Cardoso, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador, they knew each other, and, according to a friend of my friend, the Argentinian intelligence always suspected that they were lovers back then and, allegedly, they have some kind of an intimate relationship nowadays.”

“According to Max Silver, the Walrus crew was hired to kill Bernardo Fontes,” I inserted.

Harry moved one of the photographs with Miranda and Suzana and one of the photographs with Miranda and Peter closer to himself, “An assassination of a foreign ambassador in UK soil would have resulted in a grandiose diplomatic scandal and resignation of the current government headed by our current Prime Minister. However, any coup d’état should be well-funded – especially if your allies are on your payroll instead of being your friends – and five billions of pounds… that’s a lot of money.”

“It can be a bit more twisted, you know,” I remarked thoughtfully. “As I see it, they were trying to kill two birds with one stone: to create the political vacuum for Peter Ashe to fill and to help him return the favour. If Miranda Barlow has been having an affair with the Brazilian ambassador’s wife, she could want to doze the way: in political circles of any country, except for France, divorce is akin to suicide.” I shrugged, “Kill the husband – get the wife. It’s as old as the hills. If she really did Peter Ashe a good turn in case with Fabio Campos, she could blackmail him into solving this problem of hers.”

Harry stared at Ruth, “What about our asset?”

“I don’t know, Harry,” she sighed. “I’ve tried every angle, and all I could come up with is… It’s a really weird coincidence – if at all – that a few hours after the attack on the embassy, which DI McGraw witnessed, he appears in the Grid, snaps his fingers, and finds Adam. A week later, Adam tells me to look into who tipped our asset off, right before going undercover with McGraw, and in a matter of days, our assets is dead. While watching the security footage from the embassy, I noticed this—“ Ruth spread the next pile of photographs all over the desk, “James McGraw doesn’t tear his eyes off Adam before the explosion, he follows him with his eyes as Adam runs upstairs. The day before that, Adam got arrested by McGraw. As if he wanted to look closely at him. Additionally, I read his file: he is one of the best interrogators in Central Task Force, and that fact that he knew where to search for Adam—“

“They hadn’t had me for a damn day when he found me!” I protested because she was guided by facts and didn’t know what I knew. “They didn’t pumped out of me what they’d abducted me for! If he was playing on their side of the field, he would do everything to lead you away from me, not to me.”

“He knew where to find Hornigold, Adam,” Harry pinned me down to the floor with his icy, heavy gaze. “He didn’t drop his investigation into L’Urca de Lima when I specifically told him to. He magically found your son. And the police magically carried out a raid when you were undercover as Thomas Hamilton? At the same place, on the same day? I can agree that it wasn’t DI McGraw who had hacked into our network, he doesn’t have such expertise, but he knows the underground London, he knows where to find somebody who can do that. He could provide Hornigold with the information about your family. For all I know, he could well set Hornigold up to get in your good books.”

“It still just doesn’t add up, Harry!” I started talking with my hands. “Assuming that he is a mole, why in the world would he help us to break Max Silver, for example? Peter Ashe would want her dead, not tweeting, I guess. Why would he suggest that we look into Hornigold’s past in the Navy? Peter Ashe would want it buried, not exposed. And if his wife is friends with Home Secretary, it doesn’t mean that he is. Maybe, she just cheats on McGraw with Ashe. It happens at every step. It also doesn’t mean that he’s a part of their conspiracy. As to the hacker, he doesn’t have that kind of money.”

“Peter Ashe has.” Harry had always been amazing at standing his ground. “So does Richard Guthrie. Or, maybe, it wasn’t about money. City of London police is notorious for losing crucial evidence and failing to arrest wanted criminals who literally live across the street from their stations.”

Seeing where it all was going, I decided to buy some time. “Today is Friday, Harry. Give me this weekend to crack him, and if he is who you think he is, I will bring him in myself on Monday.”

Somebody knocked at the door, and at the next instance, Dimitri peered in. “Adam, some journalist is asking for you at the reception on the ground floor.”

“Thanks,” I threw to him without looking back.

Harry took his time to make a decision. “Two days. Not a second more.”

I nodded, acknowledging that we had come to an agreement, and looked at Ruth. “Ruth, gather everything you have on Peter Ashe, James McGraw, and Miranda Barlow on my desk, please.”

Was I right or wrong about James, did Harry see what I didn’t see in his actions, I was going to do my homework before going home tonight. If I were lucky, I would dig up something to prove James’ innocence, and I didn’t even want to think of what I would do if I didn’t stumble across anything useful because I wasn’t ready to admit that I no longer was as loyal to this country as I believed I was.

Taking the lift down, I didn’t expect anything extraordinary: sometimes, Mr Scott - since he knew that I worked for MI5 - came to chat with me in the disguise of a journalist to share a rumour or two that could be of interest for us both in our off-book collaboration. Nevertheless, as I reached the reception, one of the guards hailed the dark-haired woman in the familiar trench coat. Speaking of the devil…

Having turned round, Miranda Barlow smiled at me, “Mr Carter.”

There was no point in pretending that I wasn’t who I actually was, so I bowed my head slightly in mute polite greeting. “Mrs McGraw, I’m sorry, but you’re looking for your husband, he’s just left.”

“As a matter of fact, I was looking for you,” she glanced around. “Can’t we talk outside?”

“Of course, we can.” I went with her to the doors and, as a real gentleman, allowed her to go through them first before following the lady. When she stopped at the old stone stairs leading to Milbank street, I seized the opportunity to ask, “So, Mrs McGraw, how can I be of assistance?”

“Oh,” she smiled charmingly and a bit guilty, shivering thanks to this cold wind blowing all day long, “I don’t mean to be intrusive. I know what you all do in this building is very important, and my husband must be very helpful, but since his father is in hospital… I’m sure he didn’t tell you about this, he’s a very private person… I’m not complaining, not at all, but it’d be great if James could spent some time with his father and I could take some rest. It’s really necessary for me at the moment.”

Saying this, she pressed her palm to her stomach. This gesture was universal: as far as I knew, all pregnant women tended to do it, including my late wife when she was pregnant with Wes. It sure as hell was supposed to look accidental and natural; yet for me, who lied and changed legends as gloves for a living, it was nothing else but well-calculated acting. What surprised me in this performance was that even knowing that I was with MI5, she still tried to play me. As if I wouldn’t see through her game.

Suddenly, it dawned upon me that she must have been very well up on the real nature of my relationship with her husband if she counted on my inattentiveness caused by my provisional feelings to him. Or rather, my jealousy. It was quite smart of her to attempt to drive a wedge in the form of her pregnancy – no matter whether she was with child for real or not – between us, I had to give her that. However, it was obvious that although she’d managed to find me, she hadn’t bothered to make inquires about me because then, she would know that playing this card against me was a very stupid idea.

“I’m afraid there is nothing I can do about it, ma’am,” I did my best to sound as sincerely upset as possible. At times, it amazed me how well I was able to pretend to be a complete idiot. Perhaps, I should thank my appearance for that so long as people always got captivated by this mask of a good-looking, soft-mannered, dull-witted English boy, which I put on when it suited me. “DI McGraw is surely free to part ways with us at any time, but it’d be better for the nation if he kept cooperating with us until the case is closed because your husband has been rendering an invaluable service to our country.”

“Well, it was worth trying, right?” Miranda Barlow smiled radiantly at me. She wasn’t discouraged by my answer in the least. She was pleased as if she’d triumphed. I could predict without any difficulty what she expected to happen next and barely refrained from snorting caustically. “Thank you for your time, Mr Carter. I really appreciate that you’ve spared a bit of it for me.”

“My pleasure,” I smiled shortly in reply.

In sober reality of this situation, I was infinitely thankful to my professional training and years of experience because I was dying to throw this flawless mask I was hiding behind aside and tell her that there was the only way for her to get James back – over my dead body. In the 18th century, she had him all for herself, but in this lifetime, he was mine, and I wasn’t the peaceable and democratic Thomas Hamilton who loved his wife. I was awfully close to snapping her neck. Not out of jealousy, no, out of anger. I disliked when somebody tried to steal what belonged to me. Especially after Fiona’s death.

“Have a nice day!”

Happy, she waltzed down the stairs. Watching her move off, I thought to myself, “ _My dear Ms Barrow, if you came here to declare war on me, you lost it before it had a chance to start properly_.”


	17. James

Upon my coming home, I announced that we were going to visit my family because Harry had given me the whole weekend off and we were to depart as soon as we packed our bags. Whatever James thought of this sudden caprice of mine, he didn’t voice it. Instead, he insisted on driving since as opposed to me, he knew where Mary lived. I didn’t mind. I needed to cudgel my wits about everything I’d read before leaving the Grid today and for damn sure, I couldn’t do it behind the wheels.

Deeply absorbed in thought as if James wasn’t in the car with me, I looked out of the window on our way to Brighton. Perhaps, it was very impolite of me, but I was hugely thankful to him for not badgering me with questions or attempts to have a small talk about weather or something. To tell the truth, I did like his ability to keep himself aloof when he saw that I wasn’t in the mood for hanging out without taking it as close to his heart as many would do. In a relationship, it often came in handy.

My flurry of speculation was joyless: basically, there was no evidence that might witness for James, nor was there any evidence that might witness against him as well. Either he was clever enough to leave no trace leading to him, or he was innocent. There was the third possibility, though: he was involved in a varying degree, but he didn’t care, which, as far as I knew James, was more probable than anything else. If so, there was the bigger problem. At best, going down, Peter Ashe would try his hardest to drag his accomplices along, including DI McGraw, and he would go down. Harry would see to it personally. At worst, to save his neck, he would shift the blame from himself onto less important figures, such as James, and I had no idea how to get James out of this mousetrap with the least losses. Nor did I have the slightest idea how to make him tell me the truth about his involvement without pressurizing or interrogating him. That would tear us apart invariably, and I didn’t want it to end this way.

At some point, I gave up and left things to pure chance. All of them at once, except for one, which could grow like a snowball into a serious predicament if not cleared up right here and now.

“Your wife dropped by looking for you,” I turned my eyes away from the landscapes flying by to gaze at James. “About an hour after you and Superintendent Guthrie went off.”

“How did she find you?”

This, I’d love to figure out myself. However, if Miranda Barlow was closely associated with Peter Ashe, she was likely to be aware of my true identity all along. “It’s not that difficult. I’m the right hand of Sir Harry Pearce, Chief of Section D. Find Harry, who’s not hiding, by the way, and you’ll find me.”

“What did she want?”

“In a nutshell?” I snorted. “You must be with your family because your father is in hospital and your wife is pregnant.” His silence was the best proof of his being in the know of both facts and my wild guess about how he was going to proceed with it. “You weren’t going to tell me, were you?”

He refused to look at me, “I didn’t want to fall out over it with you.”

“We’re not falling out over it, James.”

He seemed not to have believed his ears. Shocked and surprised, he deflected his attention away from the road ahead to glance me in the face, “You’re not mad at me?”

I laughed. “I have an eight-years-old son, I can count, and I’m not the person who cares for others’ marriages as it is known. I would understand if she came to me in two months from now. It’s hard to conceive a child at first try, so you would have needed to have sex with her at least twice on different days for that to happen, but it hasn’t started showing yet, my theory is that she’s two-month pregnant or a bit longer. A month ago, I didn’t suspect of your existence. So why should I be mad?”

For a while, he drove the car in silence, which suited me since I thought that the subject had been exhausted. Suddenly, he cast a look at me, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

James sighed heavily. “I was thinking of telling you, to be honest. I just didn’t know how, and what would everyone said in your place? ‘Don’t be stupid, go back to your wife and raise your kid.’ I don’t want to go back to her, and I appreciate that you don’t try to make me do the right thing.”

“I’ll be damned if that is the right thing to do.” I changed my sitting posture for the reason that my neck had gone numb. “Still, if you ever decide to become a weekend father, I won’t mind.”

He must have pictured this because he smiled. I could easily relate. I would love that life to be our future. Perhaps, it would be. Provided that I would manage to succeed in finding a way out for him. For both of us. Frankly speaking, Harry disliked my standing up for James McGraw during our argument, and I didn’t bother to imagine how he would react if I tried to go farther. That wouldn’t do any good.

I was certain that Mary lived in Brighton so long as she’d mentioned it while having breakfast with us, and I got perplexed when we turned from A23 to A27 near Patcham. Then, in the middle of nowhere, we drove down onto A26, which led us to Newhaven, East Sussex. Having crossed the bridge over the River Ouse, we left the town and ended up parking in front of a two-storey house located not far away from the rocky seashore. Additionally, there wasn’t any other settlement for miles around.

As I hopped off, my father appeared on the threshold. We met halfway to embrace. Even at my age of thirty-four, I still felt like a small kid every time I saw him and coming to his house still felt like coming home whenever I came.

“Dad!” Wes rushed out of the house, not waiting for his grandfather to call him. I squatted to catch him. When I pressed him to myself, I buried my face in his small shoulder to inhale his smell. Dear God, I missed him so much... My son jerked back to look at me. “Dad, are we going home?”

I shook my head with a guilty smile, “Unfortunately, no, but I’m staying for the weekend.”

“Seriously?!” His eyes lit up. All of a sudden, I asked myself – why I kept abandoning him to do my job for the British government if all I wanted was to spend all my time with him? In the meanwhile, Wes lifted his head up and gave an energetic, cheery wave to somebody behind my back. “Hi!”

“Hi,” James responded in a very friendly and soft voice before addressing to my father. “Mr Carter, it’s nice to see you again.”

Peter Carter reached out his hand to him, “Its’ nice to see you as well, DI McGraw.”

“James,” McGraw shook his hand. “Please.”

“Adam!” My mother joined us on the lawn, so with Wes in my arms, I stood up to kiss her cheek. She cupped my face in her hands and scrutinized me. “You look much better today, sweetheart.”

Of course, I did. Thanks to James. Decent sleep, good sex, breakfast in bed, and coffee limitation worked miracles. Along with his purely marvellous ability not to get on my nerves whatever he did.

“James,” she smiled at him, “it’s very lovely of you to come to visit us again.”

“I hope I won’t be burdening you.” Judging by his voice, he was uncomfortable in her presence. Thankfully, for this once, I understood why. Had my father shot my boyfriend in my bedroom, I would have been uncomfortable, too, after the mother of my other boyfriend caught us in bed together.

“Oh, no trouble at all, love!” As a former paediatrician, Angel Carter knew how to win anyone’s favour, and I guessed to myself how long it would take for her to make friends with the tight-lipped James McGraw. “You arrived at the right moment, by the way. I’m cooking dinner, and I wouldn’t mind receiving some assistance from you, Adam, so Peter, dear, show James their room, would you?”

With Wes, I followed my mother to the kitchen and got engaged in helping her. Not that I loved to cook, I just loved to chat with her while doing something simple such as cutting vegetables or meat. My son didn’t find it interesting enough, though. As soon as my father and James pitched a camp in the living room, he migrated there to listen to their conversation that revolved around my father’s second favourite subject. I heard its fragments, and I was amazed to find out that James, who was afraid of water and couldn’t swim, was well grounded in sailing and ships. How that was even possible?!

Not to think over it any longer, I put a knife aside and went to the door. In the second it was closed, I peered at my mother in an apron bustling about by the cooker. “Their room?”

She shot a questioning look at me, “Did I get it wrong?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s the problem, Adam,” she gave up stirring the sauce she was making to face me. “You didn’t say anything. Normally, you would bring your girl to us and say, ‘Mum, Dad, this is my girlfriend.’ When we met Fiona, you told us straight away that she was your wife-to-be, but you didn’t deign to introduce James until I asked you point-black about him. Next morning, it turned out that you slept in the same bed. Now, you’re displeased with my assumption that you’re together. Because James is a man? Sweetie, I don’t care if he’s a man as long as you’re happy with him; however, if you care…”

“What?” I barely control my annoyance provoked by her reluctance to finish the sentence.

Angela Carter leaned on the cupboard at the left from the cooker with her hand. “I don’t know what happened to him, but he’s so fucked-up—“

“Mum!” I was floored. In my life, I’d never heard her using foul language.

She snorted in the same manner as I usually did it. Truly, like mother, like son. “I’m sorry to have offended your feelings, but there is no better word to describe him, Adam. He’s fucked-up. From top to toe. And he’s up to the ears in love with you. I can’t say the same about you, and I’m lost in guesses as to what is going on between the two of you because you’ve clearly led him away from his family—“

“I didn’t!” I flared up. “For God’s sake, mum! As an adult man in his right mind, he’s fully capable of deciding with whom he wants to spend his life! With her or with me!”

“Do you want to spend your life with him?” My mother did know how to cut me down to the size by getting straight to the point. “Let’s start with this if you don’t get it in the different way.”

I returned to my place at the kitchen table to sit down on the woollen stool. “The truth is,” I took the knife to keep doing a salad, “I have this gut feeling that a hell of a storm is coming, and if we survive it, if it doesn’t scatter us to the opposite ends of the world, it’s going to last till death do us part. The problem is, though, I don’t think that one of us is going to survive that storm, mum.”

“So, it’s better not to have at all than lose what you do have again?” She shook her head, watching me execute a cucumber. “You know, at my work, I’ve learnt to see through people. I have no clue about what happened to James, but when I look at him, I see the person who needs to be loved come what may.” She spread her arms just as I did it, “I know that you will have it your own way, Adam, you always do, but if I’m allowed to give you a piece of well-intentioned advice—“

“Don’t.”

Nevertheless, she didn’t listen to me, which was disgustingly predictable so long as I tended not to listen to her, either. “Let his wife take him back because you’re not ready to handle this, love.”

I clenched my teeth. “That’s not going to happen.”

With this annoying perfect calm I’d inherited from her, my mother crabbed the spoon she’d dropped onto the cupboard to revert to stirring the sauce. “Then, tell him why.”

This was all there was to it for both of us. It didn’t spoil the family dinner or our relationship or her attitude towards James. It’d always been this way between us: we argued frequently since each of us had his own opinion and stuck to it; yet we never were in the sulks with each other afterwards. Thus, I enjoyed the quiet, peaceful evening with my family full of fooling around, laughing, and telling the stories. Mostly, those were the stories about my childhood tricks, and James liked them too much to my ultimate displeasure. As all childhood stories in the world, they were unbearably embarrassing.

Around midnight, Wes, who sat next to me at first and moved onto my lap with time, fell asleep. I carried him upstairs to put in bed. When I left his room, it was already fifteen past midnight, according to my watch, which meant that it officially was tomorrow, James’ thirty-seventh birthday. I dropped in at our room to pick up the package I’d hidden at the bottom of my bag before we left my house.

Upon my returning to the dining room, the table was cleared, and my parents were waiting for me to excuse themselves and go to bed as well. James and I were sitting in silence until the door of their room slammed softly behind them. Then, I pulled out the package from under my belt on my back and my shirt at the same time to hold it out to him, saying, “Happy birthday”.

Taken aback, he got confounded and lost. He collected his present from me, nevertheless, and placed it on his knees. It seemed to me that there was no way he could wrap his mind around the fact that not only did somebody remember about his birthday but also bought something for him.

“Thank you,” James managed to say after staring at the package for five minutes at minimum without trying to find out what was inside.

“You’re not going to open it?”

Selfishly, I wanted to witness his reaction because I had my doubts about the present I’d chosen. Against my expectations, instead of tearing the wrapping away as I would have done in his shoes, McGraw unwrapped it carefully, and my heart skipped a couple of beats when his fingers touched the old Spanish edition of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. He opened it to glance at the year of publication and on the same page, right under the title, there was the inscription written by my hand. “ _James, mi verdadero amor, nunca sintáis vergüenza. A.C._ ” *(look at End Notes for translation)

This inscription had been such a pain in my ass: it hadn’t been as difficult to find a Spanish literature professor at L’Universite Paris-Sorbonne as to explain to him what I’d needed his help with since he didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak French. Mercifully, his assistant had been a bilingual Moor from Morocco. I’d put my idea down to him in Arabic, he’d translated it into French for his boss, and half an hour later, I got what I’d come for. The most embarrassing experience in my entire adult life.

Still, it was worth it. I understood it at the very moment when James raised his head to look me in the eye and I saw his face. He was shaken and touched, humbled and blown away. As he darted towards me, I decided that he was about to kiss me; however, he just embraced me as tight as he only could. Relieved and pleased with myself, I stroked his hair tenderly in return and kissed his temple.

“I know that I’m not the best of the men, Adam,” James moved back a bit to meet my eyes. “I know that Miranda can pester a saint. Sorrowfully, I can’t get divorced from her as soon as I would love to get her out of my life, but I give you my word that her visit to you was the first and the last time she’s ever bothered you. I will sort it out when we return to London. Just, please, don’t give up on me.”

I rumpled his ginger hair, “Or, perhaps, you should stop giving up on me every bloody time something happens or goes wrong, James. I’m not Lord Thomas Hamilton whom Lieutenant McGraw had to defend from every quarter. I, Adam Carter, can well deal with whatever comes my way.”

Holding the book in one hand, he stood up and extended his other hand to me with a sly smile on his lips. “Let’s see – can you deal with what I have in mind right now or not.”

I was forced to supress this nauseating feeling, whispering to me that I wouldn’t get DI James McGraw to talk to me. Tonight, at least. Be that as it might, I allowed him to lead me upstairs to our bedroom where we turned off the lights and laid the blankets on the floor because the bed was way too squeaky. In addition to that, my son slept in the next room, so we ought to be as quiet as possible. This didn’t prevent James from loosening his fantasy upon me. Positively, we would never experience any problems with the sexual side of our relationship. It just worked. Without a hitch. Time after time.

We lolled around side by side, trying to catch our breath, when we both heard some weird sound coming from the ground floor. We froze, listening to the silence reigning in the house attentively. Then, there was another quiet sound coming from the hall right under us. Somebody had broken in and headed for the stairs. Synchronically, we grabbed our clothes lying about the bed and slipped into.

Somebody was opening the door of the room in which my son slept when I sneaked into the corridor with James right on my heels. Not thinking twice, I attacked him from behind by putting my arms round his neck to suffocate to death. Laying the body onto the floor, I spotted James tiptoeing towards the stairs. As a cop, he could take care of himself, so I entered the bedroom and placed my hand on Wes’ mouth to stop him from speaking. He opened his eyes and stared at me, frightened a bit. I pressed my finger to my lips; he nodded in understanding. He silently let me wrap him in the blanket and take in my arms to carry outside. Having returned into the corridor, I almost bumped into my mother accompanied by my father. They slept in the next room and, seemingly, had been woken up by the fight occurring downstairs. I handed Wes over to Angela Carter and proceeded to the stairs first with my mother following me and my father bringing up the rear. Descending, I saw James standing over the body of yet another intruder whom he, apparently, had killed just now. He was listening to the silence around us. Having noticed me, he beckoned me to follow, which I did. So did my parents.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Translation of the inscription in Spanish (by the courtesy of end-of-the-world-optimist on Tumblr):  
> "James, my truest love, know no shame. A.C."


	18. Assault

He led us to the kitchen where I helped him to move aside one of the cupboards. The hatch, which opened to a cellar, was hidden under it. There was a bag on the ladder. James unzipped it and took out an electric flashlight. After that, he gave it to my father.

“Go down,” he whispered to him, pointing at the ladder. “There are blankets, food, and water down there. You will be safe. Just don’t turn on the lights and try not to make any sound.”

Peter Carter knew better than to argue with him, so in a matter of minutes, my family disappeared in the depths of the cellar. James and I moved the cupboard back before he squatted by the bag once again. This time, he took out two vests and the small arsenal – army knives, guns, silencers, cartridge clips, pocket flashlights, and a satellite phone that he shoved under the kitchen sink. The rest we divided between us. Thereupon, we went searching the house – room by room.

Excluding those two we had neutralised earlier, in total, there were seven of them: I shot down or stabbed three men in the first floor rooms and stumbled upon three more bodies when I returned onto the ground floor. Judging by how little I’d heard upstairs, James did know how to kill fast and quiet. A very uncommon skill for a police officer… This along with the gun without its serial number that I held in my hand made me recall my argument with Harry who didn’t believe in James’ innocence. Just as I had done in case with the trespassers I’d killed, I stopped to drag the ski masks off these bodies. Unsurprisingly, they, too, were the members of the Royal Lion crew. I’d familiarised myself with their faces to recognise them if they would come for me to avenge their captain’s death, and they’d come. Not only for me, for my entire family. The question was – how had they learnt of our whereabouts? This, I would love to ask the last man standing, so I went after him wandering about the living room.

It turned out that he was a bit smarter than his friends because he had managed to beat James by going behind him in such a manner that McGraw hadn’t noticed this. Without planning it, I found myself behind his back, in the perfect position to take him out in no time; however, I didn’t pull the trigger. I waited to see what would happen. It could be one or the other: either he wouldn’t fire at James for the reason that they were on the same side, or he would and then, I would know for sure that James had nothing to do at least with this hunt after my family. Maybe, it was an instinct; maybe, it was pure coincidence, but James turned round just as the man had a shot, so he missed, and, in turn, DI McGraw shot him dead without delay. Suddenly, he saw me standing where I stood, doing nothing, and understood everything instantly. I lowered my gun, letting him know in that way that I wasn’t going to kill him and put it under the belt on the small of my back. As if saying to him in passing, “Come on, if you want to shoot me – do it, I won’t fight with you”, I raised my hands slowly.

McGraw breezed up to me and grabbed me by the lapels with his free hand. As he drove me into the nearest wall, I expected that he would put the gun he held in the other hand to my head.

“If you have any problem with me, Adam,” he hissed furiously in my face, “you’d better tell me right now before I get shot while you’re deciding whether you have to cover my back or not.”

“I don’t have any problem with you, James,” I replied peacefully. “My boss has.”

In a flash, he calmed down and stepped back from me. “What does he think I’m involved in?”

“What the hell are you involved in?!”

Sighing heavily, James stuck his gun under his belt. “I work for City of London police. Whatever Richard Guthrie’s boys and girls are implicated in, I’m up to my neck in it as well. Racketeering, juggling with evidence, supporting the firearm traffickers and drug dealers, lying under oath in court, sabotaging investigations, falsifying reports, corruption, criminal negligence, witness intimidation, you name it.”

“How did you know Benjamin Hornigold?”

It was written all over his face how badly he didn’t want to answer this question, and there was this deep endless pain in his eyes, which made me grow cold because I still refused to believe that he was as guilty as Harry thought he was and right now he looked even guiltier than ever before.

“Having graduated from school, I ran away from home,” he uttered faintly. “I just couldn’t spend one more day under the same roof with the man who had killed my first love. I didn’t have a penny to bless myself with. All the money I’d managed to save prior to it went on buying tickets from Ellon to Aberdeen and from there to Portsmouth. Not to die of hunger, I took the job of a cook on one of the local smuggler ships. The Royal Lion. That’s how I met Ben and Richard Guthrie, who was Chief of Portsmouth police at the time. When I became the captain of my own ship, and Ben and I… we plied between the UK and Spain in turns. That’s how I learnt Spanish and educated myself in smuggling. After my ship sank off in the Celtic Sea, I broke off with the contrabandists to enrol in the university. Upon my graduation, I applied for Hampshire Police Academy. I would have never got a place there if Richard didn’t falsify my papers. That’s why I’m loyal to him and he’s, in a way, loyal to me: if one of us opens his mouth, we both will wind up in prison for twenty years at minimum. If not for fucking life.”

The next question popped up in my mind was impossibly painful for me to voice, but I had to find this out once and for all. “Do you have anything to do with my son’s abduction?”

“Damn it, Adam!” James almost blew his top. “I didn’t know that you’ve got a son!”

As it often happened in my life, before I had time to respond, something flew into the living room through the window, breaking the glass, and fell on the floor a step away from me. In the next second, it went off. Blast wave both blinded and deafened me. I got disoriented and lost my touch with reality. Still, I felt when somebody grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and led me somewhere. A few minutes later, the cold water was splashed in my face. And again. And again. And again. Until I finally managed to hear James repeating my name and discern – more or less – his worried eyes.

I mopped the water from my face, “I’m fine. It’s just a bloody stun grenade.”

As if in reply to my words, heavily fire was brought down upon us from the outside. James and I tossed to the corners synchronically and rolled ourselves up into balls there with our hands on our heads. It lasted so awfully long that when it stopped, there was only one thought left in my mind.

I raised my head, listening to the suspicious silence, and glanced at James huddled up in the corner opposite me. “Let’s hope that they didn’t take that RPG of theirs along…”

“We’re in between Peacehaven and Newhaven,” he reached for the satellite phone under the kitchen sink. “Maybe, nobody in both towns will hear shots fired, but the explosion would be noticed even in Brighton, so no, no way they’re that stupid.” He speed-dialled some number and put the phone to his ear. “Hi, love. We’re under attack. There are around fifteen of them, and they have some kind of a machine gun.” Having heard the short reply out, he hooked up. “She’s on her way.”

“Who?” I didn’t get it at first try.

“One of the British Royal Navy ships picked me up in the Celtic sea,” James explained, shoving the phone back. “When I came round, the SAS officer named Mark Reed watched by my bunk. This is the standard protocol for such situations. We made friends while sailing to Portsmouth, stayed in touch while I studied in Bristol, hung out while I lived and worked in Hampshire. At some point, I helped him save up money for his transition from male to female. Nowadays, you know him as Mary Reed.”

Another hail of bullets falling upon us prevented me from commenting immediately. On the bright side, it bought me some time for collect myself and set my wits to work. Were we under siege or not, it didn’t change the fact that I needed my questions to be answered. The sooner, the better.

“Do you have anything to do with my abduction and the attack on the Brazilian embassy?” I asked when the shooting subsided again. Apparently, they had to reload once in a while.

McGraw looked like I’d just stabbed him right into the heart, but I didn’t let myself yield to it because I must be able to get to the bottom of this conspiracy. He shook his head slowly, not believing himself that we were actually having this conversation resembling an interrogation. “No, I don’t.”

“Peter Ashe?”

It was his turn to frown in confusion. “Home Secretary? What the fuck he—“ He stopped short as he realised what was what. “You think that I…” James was forced to pause for the simple reason that his voice was ringing with anger and threatened to raise to a shout. “Fuck you, Adam!”

I waited until the next wave of bullets finished whistling over our heads. In reality, I welcomed these waves. Owing to them, I had time to ponder over his words and regroup before continuing.

“So, you know him?”

James cast a murderous glance at me, which indicated that he hated furiously every second of this exchange of suppositions and corrections. And he hated me for being persistent, and cold-blooded. Not that I was in raptures over what I was doing to him, to us, but there was no turning back already.

“Miranda does.” He puckered up. “They both attended Oxford University. Different colleges, same years. She’s been his huge fan ever since. Always ranted on how marvellous he is; how farsighted his projects are; how great he would be as Prime Minister. Although, in point of fact, he’s just yet another adroit politician with a ready tongue. I’ve never understood her crush on him.” McGraw shrugged and screwed his eyes, “So, what? He’s behind all of this? And you think I’m at one with him?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think, James.” I sighed. “I, for one, may believe you or I may not believe you. Who cares? If ultimately, there is only one thing that matters – what it all seems to be.”

“Nice to know.” His tone was the quintessence of sarcasm and causticity.

I wanted to parry, but they started shooting at us anew. Pressing myself to the wall, I nearly sensed the bullets hitting it on the other side. Although it promised to be going on forever, it was broken off abruptly. Instantly. I didn’t hear anything else for a while; then, there were steps coming from the main door, which prompted that somebody had entered the house and headed in our direction.

Mary Reed appeared on the kitchen’s threshold shortly. All she wore was black – skinny jeans, army boots, a hoodie over a tank top, mitts, and a knitted cap. She held a gun in one hand, and the other was resting in a hip holster attached to her thigh. Somehow, even in neutral clothes, without make-up, and any jewellery, with braided hair, she still was smoking hot, flawlessly feminine, and elegant like a real-life lady. It was impossible to believe that she used to be a male Special Forces officer.

“Some of these softheads ran away,” she eyed us, one after another, prior to placing the gun to the second hip holster. “They will be back, which means that your family can’t stay here any longer.”

I nodded, “I’ll take care of it.”

She departed straight away. In all probability, she was up to searching the backyard. James gave me a hand in moving the cupboard aside, and as my parents and Wes – slightly frightened, but safe and sound overall – got out of the cellar, I send them to change and pack their things. McGraw swung to go away after they obediently hurried upstairs, but I caught him and pinned to the closest wall.

“I can imagine how badly you want this to be that point where everything goes south because this would be such a great excuse for you to revert to being that cynical thug I’ve met. This all is too good to be true for you, isn’t this?” He didn’t deign to answer, so I went on, “I’m not going to apologize for treating this like a real thing with all the ensuing consequences if it’s what you’re expecting of me. I’m doing what’s needed to be done.” Tiredly, I pressed my forehead to his temple, deciding on what I was going to say next. As usual, I had to choose the lesser of two evils. “I love you too much not to.”

With these words, I turned round and walked upstairs to help my family prepare for the long journey that was awaiting them right around the corner. James didn’t see us off. He hid somewhere in the house, and I didn’t attempt to look for him. I had far more important things to worry about.

It took a bit less than four hours for me to drive my parents and Wes to Weymouth where Gerda, one of my ex-girlfriends, lived with her husband. He owed a small ship, which could deliver the Carters to Casablanca, to my friend who would get them onto a merchant ship plying between Morocco and the Bahamas. In three weeks or so, they would be welcomed by Edward Teach nicknamed Blackbeard with whom I worked in Syria in his real estate located somewhere nearby Nassau.

Heartbreakingly, my son didn’t want to part ways with me for so long. I was forced to promise him that I would fly to Nassau in a month. It wasn’t going to occur. Somehow, I knew it, and I didn’t let myself think of it. My parents, thankfully, had long made their peace with the side-effects of my unpredictable job, and since they both were retired on a pension, they didn’t mind relocating to another country – less expensive and crowded, with better climate. I stayed in Weymouth until they sailed. It happened fast because Gerda and I had been over this plan, which I’d developed just in case – with my work, it was essential to have an escape plan – a million times, so every single detail of it was foreseen, well-thought, tested, and thoughtfully prepared in advance. We simply needed to set the wheels in motion.

Nevertheless, it was past midday when I finally returned to the house on the outskirts of Newhaven. Outside or inside, there wasn’t a soul nor was there any dead body. As well as grenades, shells, weapons, and other evidence of the night assault. Somebody must have got rid of it all. I ran upstairs, and strangely, our bags still were in our bedroom. Therefore, James didn’t leave without me just because we’d had a fight. Where was he, then? Having taken bags along, I walked downstairs and, to my surprise, saw Mary who made herself comfortable on the same sofa in the living room where I gave James his birthday present yesterday. I could swear that she had been nowhere to be seen when I arrived. In one hand, she held a glass of something that looked like whiskey to me; in the other hand, she held a cigarette that smelled of pot. Evidently, this was her personal way of relaxing after killing a good half of the Royal Lion crew and, as I’ve suspected, after cleaning the mess up.

I dropped the bags down into the chair. “Where is James?”

“They took him.”

“Who?”

“Your friends, I think.” She gestured lazily towards the main door leading to the parking lot where I left my car. “Two cars of the same colour, brand, and model, matching numbers on the plates, our attitude, but instead of you – a gorgeous white male with a Greek name and a company.”

That sounded like Dimitri. Damn it, Harry… Two days hadn’t been that much to grant. On the other part, I knew how it all looked from the side: if I brought James here when I, most likely, was expected to spend this weekend in London, I could well have tried to transport him aboard. Exactly as I had done with my family a few hours earlier. Perhaps, I should have done it because Harry, seemingly, was certain that James was guilty or had proof of it. If so, it meant that James had lied to me.

Happily, there was an opportunity to confirm or refute some of his words, which I seized without hesitation. “How did you meet James?”

“Oh,” Mary took a puff at her cigarette. “My guys and I were coming back to the UK from Africa. A couple of days of doing nothing on board of HMS Kent, and out of the blue, there was this goddamned ‘Man overboard!’. When they fished him out, Jim was unconscious, barely breathing, and cold as ice. The doc said that he’d spent around two days drifting in the Celtic sea. No idea how he explained this to the Navy command or what happened to him, but sometime after we moored in Portsmouth, I asked him out for a beer, and everything was fine while we walked along Clarence Esplanade. Then, we reached Blue Reef Aquarium where the massive stone railing ends, and when he saw the water not far away from him… Man, he got paralyzed. The irony is, he comes of a family of seamen.”

This corresponded with what he’d told me about their acquaintance and shed some light on his knowledge of sailing-related things in addition. Still, it didn’t prove his innocence, alas.

“We used to be close friends, Jim and I,” she added after sipping a bit of alcohol. “Until he married this bitch. Miranda Barlow. She decided at first sight that I’m a menace to their marriage because Jim has a thing for men. Bloody hell!” Mary rolled her eyes demonstratively. “Whomever he’s into, I’ve always liked girls. Anyway, at that time, nobody knew that I was saving money for transition. Especially my guys. They wouldn’t understand. They didn’t understand when Miranda Barlow proclaimed my being a transgender woman from the housetops by publishing an article about my alter ego Sophia Bianco, a singer, in the local newspaper. I was discharged from the Army; I had to flee from Portsmouth, change my name and start a new life thanks to Mrs McGraw. Not to mention that I almost lost the only person in the world who had been supporting me on my way to becoming a woman.”

In my opinion, this did sound like something Miranda would do to preserve her status of his wife, considering that she had the nerve to try to cause a quarrel between me and James on the grounds of her early pregnancy. In the light of what James added to everything that I’d already known of her relationship with Peter Ashe, it puzzled me how stubbornly she fought to keep her marriage. As if she loved James and used Peter with some secret purpose, which I failed to figure out so far.

“If you ever come to London, you can crush on my couch for any period of time. Alone or with your girlfriend. Just…” Having grabbed the bags, I pointed at her glass and cigarette with special underlying meaning, “Don’t bring booze and weed along. I’ve got a kid, and James is still a cop.”

She laughed. “Deal!”

I directed my steps towards the door. My next stop was Thames House, the only place where Dimitri could drive James by Harry’s order. And God help them all if I wouldn’t find him there.


	19. Epicentre

In the absence of Chief of London Section D, Sir Harry Pearce interrogated me by himself. Initially, I was angry with Adam because he’d insulted and humiliated me by suggesting that I had something to do with what had been happening recently. Cognition comes through comparison, though. Harry wasn’t nearly as tactful and reasonable as Adam had made almost every effort to be. He openly accused me of being a part of conspiracy hatched by Home Secretary with the help of his Chief of Staff, Commissioner Guthrie, and my wife, and the more questions he asked, the better I understood in what position Adam had been put. He must have been torn between his loyalty to MI5 and his feelings to me, which he had to push into the background to be able to find the way out of this shit for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t exist. Not because I was mixed up in something I had no clue about, because I wasn’t supposed to get away. The longer our verbal duel lasted, the more certain of it I became. The trouble was that I went over everyone I’d ever crossed in my mind, and none of them was capable of carrying such a complex, multidimensional plan through because nobody hated me that much.

When the morning came, Ruth peered into the same interrogation room where I talked to Max a couple of days earlier and Harry left with her. I got up from the chair I was sitting on since my arrival here to stretch my legs by walking about the room. In so doing, I thought of Miranda. Harry believed that she’d been having an affair with Peter Ashe. Had she? I didn’t know. I’d always been so disinterested in her life that I wouldn’t notice. It was funny, actually: I noticed straight away that Adam was acting weird when he came home on Friday, and I couldn’t tell for sure whether my wife of ten years cheated on me or not. Even in the light of what I’d learnt about her for the last few hours. The one thing I knew for sure, none the less. I would unhesitatingly use her infidelity as the ground for a divorce.

Out of the blue, the door opened to show me Adam standing over the threshold, in the corridor, with Max looming behind his back. He beckoned me to follow, which I did, not asking any questions. As I went out, he handed over a black cap and a dark blue windcheater to me. Max had similar ones on.

“Take her out of here,” Adam gave me a visitor pass, “And wait for me by a lift.”

To reach the main room cluttered up with tables was easy. On Saturday, Section D wasn’t as overcrowded as it normally was on working days. To pass through it and especially past Harry’s office was much harder; yet we managed to do it because everyone’s attention was concentrated on Adam who had accidentally overthrown a cup of coffee onto somebody’s desk. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam himself had left this cup on the edge of it with the single purpose of breaking it afterwards in the first place. Having walked out without incident, we picked our way towards the lift, and suddenly, the corridors outside of Section D echoed with some harsh sound, repeating itself over and over again.

“Oh,” Max breathed out. “He really wasn’t kidding when he said that he would get me out and nobody would follow.” I cast a questioning look at her, and she grinned. “You don’t know what this is? This is, apparently, the famous MI5 lockdown I’ve heard so much about: it can be initiated only from within in the event of hostage-taking or security breach and can’t be turned off in any way for twelve hours. Your friend must be placed very high on their chain of command if he’s able to launch it.”

It finally dawned upon me what Adam was up to – he’d literally put his career along with his head and freedom on the line to help me escape. The question was – why would he help Max as well? While I indulged in all sorts of speculations, the steel curtain started ringing down from above the doors we’d just gone through. Mercifully, Adam darted out right before it cut off the Counter-Terrorism department of MI5 from the outside world. As he joined us, we took the lift down to the underground garage where we got into Adam’s car, and ten minutes later, we crossed the Thames River over the Vauxhall Bridge, heading south. Naturally, nobody attempted to stop or follow us.

At some point, Adam glanced at Max through the rear-view mirror, “Well?”

“It was a woman, the person who’d offered us the map after Peter Ashe called our initial deal with him off,” she kept looking out of the window, on London streets and signs. “I don’t know her name, nor does my husband. In our business, we don’t go for names. I never saw her, but John, who communicated with her via Skype, said to me that she chose Portuguese over English and that she spoke this language better than John himself who spent his childhood traveling back and forth between Spain and Portugal. She also was well up on his biography. That’s odd because he’s secretive about his past.”

“Who introduced them to each other?”

Mrs Silver shook her head, “Nobody. She contacted him directly and she knew in advance that the map would be of interest to him. She named it as the price for what she needed, first of all.”

“What did she ask in return?”

“The clock,” Max directed her eyes to Adam. “A replica of the 18th century clock, to be precise, which should be delivered to London by April, 5th, and it was. From Lisbon, on the ship named the Royal Lion captained by Benjamin Hornigold who’d been recommended as a transporter by that woman.”

“Where it is now?”

She shrugged in hidden annoyance determined by his peremptory tone. “In my friend’s house. Drop me off there safe and sound, and I will give the clock to you.”

No additional questions were voiced.

Overall, it was an uncomfortable hour-and-a-half-long journey, which we undertook in silence. As Adam pulled over in front of some brick building in southern Bromley, Max hopped off before he stalled the engine and ran up the stairs to knock at the door with her fists and feet. She wouldn’t stop hammering until it was blown open by a skinny, red-haired woman in an oversized male shirt that barely covered her long legs. I identified her as Anne Bonny. I didn’t make out what the women were chatting about, so when they came inside, I turned to Adam, unable to keep my mouth shut any longer. He stared at the windshield with, drumming on the wheel with his fingers impatiently and irritatingly.

Having sensed my look, he cast a sidelong glance at me, “You must leave the country.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I snarled in a half of my voice not to be heard in the street. “Unless you’re coming with me, and if you’re not coming with me, I’m coming with you wherever you’re going.”

“I needed to stick my neck out for you so that you started to trust me?” He shorted caustically and looked at me with scarcely concealed anger. “It’s a bit too late for that, don’t you think?”

My first impulse was to talk back in order to protect myself from his verbal attack out of habit cultivated in me by my dear father. Having taken a deep breath, I counted to ten to myself prior to answering. “The truth is, I’m not proud of my past, Adam, and I’d love you not to know of what I’ve done in my damn life, but had you asked point-blank instead of tiptoeing around, I would have told you everything and, most of all, that I have nothing to do with whatever my bloody wife is involved in.”

“It’s truly gratifying to know that you’re so sure that I consider you to be guilty.”

Another deep breathe, another count to ten. It was inhumanly hard for me not to start a fight just because he hurt me by stating the obvious, and all in vain. I had to make way for Max who came running back to our car. She leaned one of her elbows on the front passenger door, which window had been rolled down by me, and held a mobile phone she’d brought along out to Adam past me. There was a colourful picture of a middle-sided antique clock on its right-angled screen. The 18th century or so.

“This is that clock,” Mrs Silver explained hastily. “It was agreed that it would be collected on April, 6th, in exchange for the map, but it didn’t happen, so I hoped that Anne would still have the clock. However, it was called for a few hours ago.” Max swiped to another picture. “By this woman.”

The first thing I recognised was Miranda’s fancy Mini Cooper by which she was photographed with the unremarkable carton box in her arms. I barely had time to realise what this meant because Adam abruptly started the engine to go after my wife as if he knew where she had gone.

“That’s not all!” Max exclaimed to attract his attention and began to jabber in the same manner that she’d jabbered that night in Milton Park. “This clock was made by one of my husband’s friends – a professional watchmaker who’s also a self-taught bomb maker. I don’t know whom it’s intended for, but it’s loaded with C4, it’s remotely operated, and it can be detonated at any time of her choosing.”

“Thanks,” Adam gave her a dismissing nod. “We’re even. You’re free to go.”

As Max stepped back, he drove off and didn’t stop until we reached Elmfield Road where he parked the car by the pavement in one of the temporary empty parking places. The London train station called Bromley South was around a five-minute walk from here, so the hint was more than broad.

“Your bag is in the boot,” he turned to me. “There are money and the fake passport inside.”

It was when I lost the battle with my bad temper. “I seem to have told you that I’m not going anywhere! I get it that you don’t trust me, but somebody has set me up and I want to find this son of a bitch so the next time, you have to cover me, you won’t fucking stand there, questioning me.”

“I don’t question you, James!” Today, for a change, Adam wasn’t much better than me at controlling his temper. “I’m not your father who nags at you on every occasion! I’m not your wife who doesn’t give a damn about what you want! So, stop treating me as if I’m your bloody enemy!”

All of a sudden, this ball of anger within me that wouldn’t leave me alone for the last ten hours or so burst like a soap-bubble, and I calmed down in a matter of seconds. “Of us two, you’re the rational one, Adam, and I’m the erratic one. If I’m going down – I’m going down, and you’re not going down with me just as I’m not going down with you. So, start using your fucking brain and let me do stupid things.”

As I spoke, I could watch him cool off gradually, and he was trying to supress a smile by the moment I was done giving him this dressing-down. Unbelievably, for the first time in my life, I’d managed to handle a fight in such a way that it didn’t end up in disaster and in so doing, I hadn’t had waived anything. Moreover, this showdown hadn’t set us apart. Quite the opposite, I’d expressed my opinion on the subject matter, he’d heard it out, and he was fine with my disagreement. It took me aback so much that I didn’t dare say anything else until he turned the car round to drive us back.

“Where are we going?”

“If I’ve solved this riddle correctly,” Adam screwed up his eyes for a second, not tearing them away from the road, “There is only one place where she could go. Let’s hope we won’t be late.”

Later on, in Kensington, Adam braked by the fence surrounding the old, enormous three-storey mansion with big windows and large porch, which left me speechless owing to the fact of its very existence. Having got out of the car, I waited for him to round it and join me in front of the gates.

“This is…” I pointed at the building, unable to believe that I really saw what I saw.

Adam nodded in confirmation. “The Hamiltons’ house, yes.” He went up to the fence to ring a bell. Shortly, a stiff male voice replied, and he said, “Adam Carter, MI5, to see Home Secretary.”

The gates opened automatically, and we rushed inside. I had no clue what it was like for Adam, but for me, it was like stepping into the nightmare that had been haunting me, hunting me to kill.

__With a heavy heart and gloomy thoughts, I jumped onto the wet ground from the carriage harnessed with two horses and surveyed the house in front of me prior to entering it. Inside, I handed over my hat and cloak over to a servant. I found them in the living room. All three of them._ _

_Peter Ashe approached me first, “He returns at last. It’s good to have you back, Lieutenant.”_

_“Sir,” I bowed my head quickly, shaking his hand._

_Wearing the beautiful green dress, Lady Hamilton was the next in the line, “Welcome home.”_

_Thomas stayed in the background, far away from me, watching me kiss Miranda’s hand, which she extended to me as the Queen herself would do it. In a way, she was the queen of this house. Only when all the appearances were kept up, Lord Hamilton came up to me with the outstretched hand._

_“Three months,” Thomas was doing his best not to sound or look happy although he was incredibly happy to see me again. He could well be because he hadn’t heard yet the awful news I was to inform him of. The news I couldn’t stop thinking of even in his presence. “Feels like twice as long.”_

It did feel twice as long. To enter this house again three hundred years after the day that had destroyed the lives of us all – James McGraw, Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow – for good.

Adam knew where to lead me. Either he remembered the plan of the mansion in which Thomas Hamilton, most likely, had grown up, or he’d been here before as Adam Carter. I stumbled on the plane surface when I saw the man who met us in the living room. It was furnished in a different – modern and dandified – way now, but it still was that very living room from my dreams, from my recollections. So was the master of the house – a lean man in his forties with grey streaks in his light brown hair.

“Mr Carter,” Peter Ashe in the flesh held out his hand to Adam, “I must say that I expected that Sir Harry Pearce would come to debrief me on your negotiation with Mr and Mrs Silver.”

“I’m afraid that we’ve got a situation in Thames House that requires Harry’s full attention, so I’m here instead of him.” Shaking his hand, Adam was the embodiment of courtesy and carelessness.

Against my will, I recalled the early days of our acquaintanceship: back then, I had no idea that this well-mannered Englishman was just a role he played convincingly well when it suited him. At present, I had, yet I believed him all the same. So did Peter. It could meant one or the other: ether he didn’t suspect why we’d arrived here, or he was even better than Adam at acting. To tell the truth, I was gravitating to the first probability right until I noticed the familiar olive green trench coat handing on the back of one of the armchairs and the less familiar clock on the antique coffee table with arched legs.

“Peter…” As ill luck would have it, Miranda appeared in the doorway, leading to the private part of the mansion as I knew thanks to my memories from the 18th century. Having seen Adam and me, she instantly grew much paler than usual. “James, what are you doing here? What happened?”

“What are you doing here?” I inquired in a deceitfully calm voice. “Shouldn’t you be at home, resting? I’ve heard that it’s imperative in your condition. Unless you plan to have a miscarriage.”

“You’re pregnant?!”Peter Ashe MP appeared to be sincerely shocked and confused.

“I’m afraid,” I remarked caustically, looking at him standing on my left, “the right question in this situation is, who is the bloody father?” Then, I directed my eyes back to my wife. “Tell me, my sweet, how long this lovely friendship of yours have been lasting? Ten years or longer? And what lie have you been feeding to him? That I won’t give you a divorce if you ask for one? That I don’t give a shit about your infidelity? Or that we have an open marriage?” I couldn’t care less about what she had to say in reply, so instead of waiting for her to speak up, I turned to Peter Ashe. “For your information, sir, I left her a few days ago, and I won’t be back because I’m done with this bullshit she calls ‘our marriage’.”

“You will.” She dove into the handbag hanging on her shoulder. “Unless you want to live out your days in maximum security prison for the premeditated assassination of Home Secretary.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” I swung back to face her. “What the f—“ My voice broke off at the sight of a small remote controller in her hand. “Drop it!” I commanded. “Now!”

“James, there is nothing for us in England.” Miranda exhorted me like a slow-witted child. “We will move to the country with no extradition, and we will be living happily there. The three of us – you, me, and our baby. You won’t have to work long hours and get hurt on duty. We won’t be needy.”

It all combined together – her voice, her words, her firm belief that I would listen to her no matter what, her thirst for the life I’d never wanted to lead, her stubbornness that had trapped us all in this absurd situation – drove me as mad as never before. Anger clouded my judgement in a flash.

 “Just in case you haven’t noticed yet, I love this fucking island!” I roared. “I’d rather die in a ditch here with the man I love than live in grand style aboard with you. So, go ahead, blow us all to the dogs!”

It happened incredibly fast and, somehow, not fast enough. Miranda pressed the button on the remote, and the blast wave threw me down onto the floor, but I was too far from the clock to be injured. I was deafened, nothing more. Owing to that, I didn’t hear my goddamned wife running away although the heels of her shoes must have been rumbling in time with the movements of her legs. Having struggled to my feet, I looked around and saw Adam lying on his side in the epicentre of the explosion. He didn’t move, and a good half of his face – if not all his face – was bloody medley.

He shouldn’t be there. He couldn’t be there. He was even farther from the coffee table than me. Much father. I knew it. I remembered it. How could he… Suddenly, I caught the glimpse of Peter Ashe crawling from behind Adam’s body. Then, it hit me. What must have happened behind my back. I had been so carried away by the quarrel with Miranda that I hadn’t noticed how this coward had pushed Adam onto the clock to shield himself from the bomb. Blinded by anger, pain, and hatred, I jerked to Home Secretary, turned him – stunned, wounded, and disoriented – over onto his back and took him by the throat to strangle with my bare hands, trying to strangle my lost dreams in passing. My own soul that didn’t know how to live without Adam. Just as it hadn’t known how to live without Thomas.

“Adam Carter sends his regards,” I hissed to Peter’s face before his eyes rolled up.

**The end.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear reader,
> 
> First of all, I want to thank you for reading this story. I know that it was the long journey and I do hope that you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Also, I know that many questions were left unanswered and many storylines seem to be abandoned. The truth is, this story was written with a sequel in mind, so many things as well as many characters were included in it so that I had the reference point for the next instalment. Will this sequel be written or not depends on Season 3 of Black Sails. Apart from my life circumstances and readers' reaction. And Adam and James, of course.
> 
> Secondly, I want to thank my amazing supporters and helpers without whom this story would have never come into existence:  
> sophannically - for having talked me into writing it in the first place.  
> delahov - for my Max, the Portuguese language, the Brazilian embassy, the ambassador and his wife.  
> astrangegirlsmind - for the Hamiltons, and reading every chapter ASAP.  
> end-of-the-world-optimist - for the Spanish language.  
> ice-cream-and-noodles - for my Mary Reed.  
> rurudapirate - for spotting typos, which I missed.
> 
> THANK YOU VERY MUCH!


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